Why Was Gina Carano Cancelled?

It’s hard to believe it’s been over half a decade since Gina Carano was unfairly fired from The Mandalorian. Since then she has made a comeback through her high profile fight with Ronda Rousey and a new planned series called Logan Reign, set in Las Vegas.

Still her character of Cara was recently all but cut out of the Mandalorian Lego movie, and she remains an extremely polarizing figure in some corners of the internet such as Reddit.

Her critics after almost 6 years can’t seem to forgive her for what were offenses most people wouldn’t even notice. They continue to smear her, drag her into conversations she’s not even a part of and seem hellbent on destroying this woman’s career.

It’s a truly surreal situation and one that has both fascinated and infuriated me. Whilst I admit to being a fan of Gina, my defense of her actually goes way beyond that. Her haters truly represent one of the worst examples of mob mentality I’ve ever seen and need exposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

The real question though is why did this happen? What did Gina Carano actually post?

Well that’s what we are going to explore in this article. We will lay out the full reasons as to why she was cancelled and why her haters are so dedicated after half a decade. Unlike articles from Den of Geek, TV Tropes, IndieWire, Screen Rant and The Mary Sue. We will back everything we say here up.

The Cancellation

Disney are a classic example of a company letting the loud and obnoxious minority get their way over the silent majority. Compare how many the petition to keep Gina got, to the pitiful number the petition to ban her got?

Before we explore the real reasons, let’s look at the actual cancellation itself and what her critics often claim were the reasons. It all began in 2020 when Gina Carano was starring as Cara Dune in The Mandalorian.

Some fans asked her to put BLM in her profile. Carano politely declined as she did not want to get involved in politics ironically and these fans did not take it well. They started to smear Gina as a white supremacist, and asked for her to be fired.

It then escalated when they demanded she share her pronouns. Again she declined as she wasn’t sure what it meant at first and later felt it was a violation of her privacy. Once again there were smears this time that she was LGBTphobic, that she was a bigot and even death threats sent to her as seen here. Her critics also became angry at her views on COVID masks which we’ll get to in a minute.

Click to enlarge if it’s too small to read. Same applies for other pictures.

NEVER forget that sites like The Mary Sue, Screen Rant, Indie Wire, Reddit not only turned a blind eye to this level of abuse being directed at a woman, but actually encouraged it by repeating their smears and saying these people needed to be pandered to.

After weeks of this kind of abuse non stop, Gina put beep boop bop in her pronouns as a lighthearted, jokey reference to Star Wars. (As that is the noise R2D2 makes.)

When one of her friends explained that could be interpreted as mocking pronouns. She stated that was not her intention and later removed it. Nevertheless for this Gina has been tarred as not only transphobic, but LGBTphobic in general by sites like TV Tropes, Reddit, Wikipedia, IndieWire, etc for five years and counting since.

Here are some examples of their ridiculous smears.

From TV Tropes, though to be fair when I raised a complaint they did amend it. They still blocked me and they left this for 6 years before I demanded it be changed. The fact that such awful slander was allowed to remain on a site millions of people visit each year for half a decade. A site that is supposed to be impartial, is terrifying.

Below are some examples from Reddit.

Note: Pedro NEVER scolded Gina. Ironically he told her to give into the bullies for her sake, as he knew how abusive they could be. His exact words “they’ll leave you alone.”

That last one in particular is hilarious as here is what Sonya DeVille thinks of Gina. (PS Gina has retweeted Sonya several times too.)

Jump to 9:33

Redditors REALLY do their research don’t they? PS this was taken after that ignorant comment. Only good thing is that Sonya would be just as disgusted with that virtue signalling ignoramus as I was if she ever read it.

The sad irony is that Gina actually had a very positive history with the LGBT community for decades before hand.

She grew up next to a gay bar which she worked in as a teen. She also befriended Tonya Evinger, an openly lesbian woman in the 00s, to such an extent people thought they were lovers.

To be fair the two were seen holding hands, going into gay bars together, and Tonya made it clear many times (including before their first fight.) That she had feelings for Gina too.

Ultimately however Tonya said it never went beyond a kiss. Nevertheless Tonya still thinks very highly of Gina after almost 20 years and even liked my post calling the accusations of Gina being LGBTphobic ridiculous.

See here.

Link to Tonya talking about Gina and screenshots for those who can’t be bothered to click.

Pictures of Gina and Tonya together, which clearly prove Redditors opinions that Gina is disgusted at lesbians true. Only a raging lesbophobe takes pictures where their lesbian friend with a crush on them stares at their tits.

One could even say she did her tiny bit for gay rep back then, as consider this. She was a huge superstar at that point in the world of sports. Literally the woman’s face of MMA and society wasn’t as accepting of gay people in the 00s. Also a large percentage of her fanbase were obviously straight men lusting after her. For Gina to have 0 care over articles saying she and Tonya were lovers was a positive step and not one you’d have seen from many female bombshell celebs at that point.

At that point Elvira, Cassandra Peterson who is often praised as an ally was in the closet! She had been with a woman since 2002 and wouldn’t come out until the 2020s because she was so scared that revealing she was bisexual would turn off the men lusting over her who made up the majority of her fanbase.

Meanwhile here are articles writing it as FACT that Gina and Tonya were an item that she evidently didn’t care enough to even correct.

https://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/caranos-chick-wants-punch-internet-punks-face–mma.html

https://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/good-v-evil-innocent-carano-corrupted-evinger–mma.html

On top of this Gina has also played bisexual women and shared onscreen kisses with girls.

She has also shared fan art of herself as Xena the Warrior Princess, a famous bisexual character and she defended her lesbian co-star Katy O’Brian from homophobic online abuse.

She also has expressed support for pride parades right to free speech and the VERY first person to cosplay Cara Dune was Jay Justice, a queer, black, disabled activist and Gina sought her out and complimented her cosplay!

Finally the founder of Gina Carano.Net who tweets under the handle @RoarAshley who has arguably done more to support Gina than anyone else in the public eye is openly gay.

See here. Screencaps.

Yeah not exactly someone who is disgusted with LGBT people. Indeed if she’d made more of a stink about things like her friendship with Tonya like some other virtue signalling celebs have done. She could have been seen as a great ally and had gushing articles on Pink News written about her. Sadly for Gina she was too down to earth for that. She actually viewed the LGBT people in her life as people, and not trophies for her ego like other celebs do.

Still that one at worst mishap (though I don’t think it was.) Is enough for her to be smeared as LGBTphobic for the rest of her life?

Beyond this Gina has also been smeared as far right. Now I wouldn’t have any issue with her as an actress if she was. As we’ll see plenty of other actors and writers have said and done things I disagree with. Unless they are actually criminals I have 0 problem separating the art from the artist. I’d be a raging hypocrite if I didn’t given my love for Edgar Rice Burroughs and Roald Dahl as authors.

Still the great irony is Gina isn’t even that right wing. She is at most arguably centre right, though some might find even that an extreme label fpr her.

As you can see she has a very positive history with LGBT people, she is a pioneer for women in a male dominated area, MMA and she also expressed support for Julian Assange when he was arrested and tortured for exposing American war crimes and called out Hillary Clinton selling weapons to Israel.

See here.

The only ways in which she leans right are her opinions on vaccines and support for Trump in 2024. Even then however neither of those opinions are exclusive to the right.

Jimmy Dore, one of the most far left youtubers felt exactly the same as Gina on both subjects. (He also follows her.)

I don’t have much of an opinion about the vaccines myself, but why supposed left wing, anti establishment people view criticising how the government handled COVID as beyond acceptable, when they clearly established a two tier system, baffles me.

Meanwhile whilst I am certainly no fan of Trump, back in 2024 he was the anti war candidate and during his first term was the only US President of the past 20 years not to start a new war. Now we all know that he went back on his word, like a typical politician and started the war in Iran in his second term.

Still he and his supporters are no different to Biden and his followers in that respect. Both similarly hoped their candidate would represent a positive change but were let down. Biden carried out even bigger atrocities in Gaza. Are we going to say Lady Gaga is complicit in a genocide for supporting Biden in 2020?

At the end of the day America needs to abandon its two party system. Regardless of who wins, the Republicans or the Dems it makes very little difference. The majority of the country still lives in poverty, new illegal wars are always started, and social divisions are still used to distract people in various ways whether its Dems or Republicans. At most a President might be able to change a few minor things like Trump banning trans athletes from competing in women’s sports or Obamacare, but in the long run? No, it’s the same meaningless blob of grey for America and the UK incidentally as well.

The Presidents meanwhile are not just useless figureheads. They are distractions. The media every once and a while can make one look good like Obama and dupe people into thinking a real change will come, or they can demonize one so that we think “get rid of him and it will all be better.” Or alternatively, they’ll use reverse psychology. People will be tricked into thinking if the media hates him then he must be doing something right.

In the case of Trump I personally feel both his followers and critics have been misled in the latter two ways. Again nothing to be ashamed of, as everybody has been misled about politicians at some point.

John Pilger, possibly the most genuine left wing journalist of all time supported Trump (though only in a lesser of two evils approach) on the grounds that he seemed anti war at least and if the media hated him we should be suspicious.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161029044235/https://politicalscrapbook.net/2016/02/john-pilger-praises-trump-says-he-has-an-absence-of-hypocrisy/

Also it should be mentioned that despite his actions in Iran, Trump was not necessarily worse than Biden or Kamala. Biden’s actions caused the death of 80 thousand people in Gaza and he also helped remove Bashir Al Asaad, a secular Muslim leader on his way out of the door. Prior to this Biden also supported the Iraq war that killed over 1 million people, and the war in Libya which led to a rise in ISIS. He has a history almost as bad as Hillary Clinton when it comes to war mongering.

At the very least he and others like him weren’t an alternative to the Donald.

Ultimately again the entire two party, elitist system needs dismantled in both the US and the UK, which is why political tribalism needs to vanish. You can’t therefore single out Gina for thinking one half of the two party would bring a positive change as again we all have at one point.

Other than these fleeting comments. Gina hasn’t actually talked much about politics at all. Nobody knows what her opinions even are on most subjects like free health care or gay marriage etc.

To smear Gina as too far right to ever appear in a mainstream production again based on these few fairly mild opinions or to frequently call her disgraced is ridiculous. Even more so when we look at some of the actual far right actors and directors her most vicious critics do praise, though we’ll unpack that later.

However the final straw for Disney was a post from Gina that they claimed trivialized the holocaust by comparing the plight of Republicans to Jewish people.

The post did not do this at all. Still at the time even I accepted this narrative that she had at least compared her enemies to the Nazis, though as old posts will show I still supported Gina and felt that she was done wrong from the beginning.

The reason I felt that way was, EVERYBODY COMPARES THEIR ENEMIES TO THE NAZIS. Who hasn’t called an old boss, an old teacher, or yes a politician they despise a Nazi or Hitler?

Trump has been likened Hitler by comedians, critics, rival politicians non stop for over ten years. No matter how much you hate Trump you can not say in good conscience that he is as bad as Hitler as he hasn’t, you know started a world war, killed millions of people etc.

Yet the likes of Pedro Pascal get away with calling Trump Hitler all the time. Here is a post by him from round about the same time as Gina doing exactly that. Contrary to what his fans on reddit say, he did not take this down when Disney asked. Ironically HER post was taken down.

Now fair enough you absolutely can argue that we shouldn’t as a society trivialize the horrors of the Nazis by comparing any asshole we dislike to them. Still to zero in on ONE person for it is ridiculous. It shows that Disney and Gina’s critics were just looking for any old excuse and because her record is clean. They seized on this and twisted it.

Saying she trivialized the holocaust without any context as many posts on sites like the Mary Sue and Collider did, leads people who don’t know the truth to assume it must have been worse than it was. When you say someone trivialized the holocaust, most people will NOT think that person said “that guy I don’t like is like Hitler” . They are more likely to think someone said “it wasn’t that bad”, “they exaggerated the number of people killed” etc.

Also most people when looking at news articles, are skimmers, unless it’s a topic they are interested in so when they see a headline “Gina Carano trivialized the holocaust.” They won’t double check it unless they are already a big fan like me. They’ll assume that she must have said something serious, and will file it away under she is a Nazi and maybe not even remember the context, but they’ll repeat it when her name comes up again.

This will lead to people who see their post assuming the same and it eventually becoming received wisdom that she is a Nazi which is exactly what has happened.

It’s a very weasly way to slander someone, but as evidenced by the people who repeat “she is a Nazi” without knowing the full context. An effective one.

This is also where the she is anti semitic complaint comes from too. She certainly never had any problems with Jewish people at any point in her career.

The epitome of a man who knows nothing yet feels the need to open his mouth anyway, much to the chagrin of anyone unfortunate enough to hear him.

However the irony is that Gina didn’t even compare her enemies to the Nazis. Looking at it again you can see that at no point are Republicans even mentioned. She didn’t even write it. It’s a repost talking about how people can be dehumanized for their politics which is absolutely 100 percent true and is something the Nazis did when they slaughtered their political enemies.

Here is the post.

For this post Lucasfilm not only fired Gina, they did so over social media and they slandered her at the same time.

As you can see that post straight up lies. At no point did Gina denigrate people based on their cultures. Also she was never a problem for Lucasfilm as an employee. Ironically everybody who worked with her had nothing but the kindest things to say about her.

See here.

Pedro Pascal himself. (Far from chiding her for being trans skeptic as Redditors claimed.)

He said this a mere month or two before Disney fired her and AFTER the trans backlash.

Emily Swallow

Still even if Gina HAD been a trouble to work with. Then as a professional you absolutely do not air your dirty laundry in public. For your own sake as much as anything else. This post is almost like a parody of someone being unprofessional it’s so extreme.

Sadly after this shameful sacking, Gina was dropped by her agent. Incidentally her agent sounds like a piece of work as not only did they stab their client of several years in the back almost instantly. They also had earlier tried to pressure Gina into exposing her breasts during the making of Deadpool as Gina details below.

Apparently demanding an actress get her breasts out isn’t as offensive to this agent as saying let’s not hate each other.

Gina would go on to make two films with the Daily Wire who were the only people that would hire her, before going through a drought of 4 years and counting. She was eventually able to sue Disney for wrongful dismissal. Disney tried to get it thrown out twice, but it was dismissed (with the judge having even been appointed by Biden, yet even she could see Disney were full of it. See her comments below.)

https://www.justjared.com/2024/07/25/gina-carano-responds-after-disneys-attempt-to-get-lawsuit-over-mandalorian-firing-dismissed-is-denied/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Whilst Disney were forced to settle and as we explored earlier, she has made a return to mainstream via Ronda Rousey and Netflix. Gina still lost many years of both her career and to some extent her life.

The backlash was so severe her haters sent drones to stalk her house, forcing Gina to move from where she had lived for over 10 years. She subsequently was forced to live in a motor home for a year to escape the stalkers and even started to cut herself during her blackest moments. The damage to her mental health destroyed her physical health (and considering she was a legendary athlete before, how bad must it have been.) At one point she could barely walk.

How did her critics react to hearing that she had been driven to this?

Nice to know he thinks a woman cutting herself is funny.

I’d bet anything that the Mary Sue will post about mental health awareness without a hint of irony. Meanwhile Steven S DeKnight made me laugh when he recently went on about how much he loves to see women kicking ass.

That why he cheered on an ACTUAL strong woman getting that level of abuse and her mental health being destroyed? Also that why he was the story editor on Buffy season 6, that famously saw the title character and feminist icon almost get raped by the bad boy she couldn’t resist whilst the supposed nice guy she rejected had the perfect life? PS Sarah Michelle Geller is still openly hostile to that season, describing it as demeaning to her as an actress and the character of Buffy and felt it was porn. She even begged Joss Whedon of all people to come back for season 7 she hated it so much.

Also he was story editor on season 4 of Angel, that saw Charisma Carpenter bullied, mistreated and fired. (Which he did nothing to oppose.) It also turned her complex character into a cradle robbing perv. Finally he did Spartacus Blood and Sand which had Lucy Lawless another female icon get her tits out for male gratification.

Yeah not a good track record with the ladies Steven.

Again the question is why was Gina subject to such cruelty? Why is she still the object of such derision? Not only were her supposed crimes minor if anything at all, but the suffering she has been through, from losing her career, death threats, being forced to move house, destruction of her mental and physical health from the stress etc, is surely disproportionate. You’d think there would at least be a “I don’t like Gina, but that was horrific what she went through” but no. Ironically they actually prove Gina’s point about how they don’t view someone who doesn’t share their politics as fully human. Hence why they can’t summon up even the tiniest bit of sympathy for a woman cutting herself or being threatened with drones.

Still there are other reasons for the viciousness. In my opinion the following five are the most important beyond ironically what Gina herself explored in her supposedly offending Instagram post.

Jilted, Entitled, Parasocial Fans

The Mary Sue and Reddits attitude to Gina Carano is like the creep in a pub who perves over the waitress and goes nuts when she doesn’t go out with him as you will soon see.

Despite being subject to a ridiculous amount of hate. You could argue that Gina Carano doesn’t have haters per say. More jealous wannabe exes.

A huge percentage of her haters. Not all, but certainly some of the most vocal, originally loved Gina back in 2019-2020. Namely the Mary Sue and Reddit who later helped lead the charge against her.

Here are some of their articles and quotes about Gina from that time that look like they were written in a parallel universe compared to their later hit pieces. Ironically the Mary Sue articles praising her were written by Rachel Leishman who became Gina’s biggest critic and wrote some truly scathing and vicious articles about her.

Leishman wrote a goddamn LOVE POEM to Gina Carano she was so smitten, but hey maybe this is just one person on The Mary Sue right?

WRONG look at the comments on the article from their users and supporters.

Meanwhile how did Reddit react to her? Note: I’m not saying that every individual who made these positive comments turned on Gina the way Rachel Leishman did. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t but it’s not fair to automatically tar them with the same brush. However the point is that these comments all got overwhelming support in terms of likes and not being challenged, which would NOT happen in some cases on these sites just a few months later. (I was banned from Reddit for life for simply defending Gina. They hilariously called me a simp with a creepy fixation. Unlike them I didn’t write any poems or tell the world how attracted to her I was on reddit. I simply pointed out, hey she’s not a Nazi bigot from hell, and that was enough to get me banned as a trouble maker.)

Clearly at this point the shit lib side of fandom adored Gina Carano. To be clear the shit libs are not the same thing as leftists. It’s important to make that distinction.

Can you imagine someone like John Pilger getting upset at a woman in a sci fi tv show not doing what he asked? Shit libs are a shallow, elitist distortion of left wing politics. They have always existed. We called them hippies in the 60s, obnoxious punk poets in the 80s, SJWs in the 2010s. These days people call them woke, though I don’t like that term, as woke actually means being aware of inequality. Okay words can change their meaning, but letting shit libs appropriate woke feels like a sneaky tactic of theirs to equate themselves to genuinely progressive politics.

Shit libs is a better more accurate term for me as it shows how they are poseurs who want to be seen as radical and progressive, but don’t have the brains or mettle to tackle real inequalities so they’ll focus on trivial bullshit. These people are often used by the elites like Disney as a cover to make themselves look good (as unlike actual leftists such as John Pilger or Jimmy Dore who would challenge them. Shit libs are safe for the elites.)

Some shit libs are simply misguided to be fair by those in the media, but either way their politics are shallow, divisive and tribal at best.

Shit libs naturally thought given she was a strong woman with a positive LGBT history, that Gina would be another Lucy Lawless or Pedro Pascal. IE someone who would pander to them and say they were her REAL fans above all the others, and do any virtue signalling ritual they demanded.

Just to be clear I don’t dislike Lucy Lawless. Oh good god no, and I’m not saying she is weak or anything. She clearly enjoys connecting with fans like that which is fine.

Gina however is more private overall and whilst always appreciative of her fans. She didn’t want to make big gestures online as she personally felt they were hollow, which she is allowed to think.

However these fans were not used to a celebrity saying no. (They don’t seem used to not getting their way in general) and did NOT react kindly to Gina politely declining their rituals.

Understandably after being threatened with death Gina did not back down and hilariously far from liking strong women. They got angry enough to the point where they sent her death threats, or turned a blind eye to those who did.

Now fair enough our opinions can change at certain points, but the likes of Reddit and The Mary Sue started to completely rewrite history. They claimed Gina was always a bad actress, that she was ugly, that Cara Dune was a minor character nobody cared about or even remembered.

See here.

From Rachel Leishman who once said she would do ANYTHING Gina asked her to do, and wrote a love poem.

Must have been mighty stiff acting Rachel if it made you cry and write love poems? https://www.themarysue.com/the-disney-and-gina-carano-is-over-in-what-is-a-predictable-move/

But I thought you said you’d do anything she said? Turns out if she didn’t do anything YOU said, she goes from being someone who moves you to tears to an unwanted bitch with stiff acting?

But you said the entire internet loves her?

Here they are also rewriting her past relationship with Pedro Pascal. Note: Pedro Pascal and Gina Carano no longer keep in touch, but that is certainly not the same as them disliking each other, either today or back then. They were both incredibly close friends when working on the Mando and did keep in touch for a while after. Sadly Pedro I DO think let Gina down by not saying more to defend her, something he according to Gina apologised to her for at least. I admit to having perhaps come down a bit too hard on Pedro in the past for not defending Gina as much as I think he should. Maybe he thought it would blow over, maybe he didn’t know the absolute full extent of the viciousness?

It certainly is a bit of a black mark against him, but still both Gina fans (including at one point, yes me.) And especially Pedro fans that hate the other are fools as there was no feud.

The Mary Sue meanwhile used to love their friendship. Here in 2020 Rachel Leishman gushing about how cute it is that Pedro absolutely loves her, with Pedro apparently being a big fan even before The Mando.

Oh the irony for Rachel Leishman to talk about how moved she is about the difficulties Gina faced in her career.

Anyway yeah what they now try to frame it as. That they always disliked each other and there was on set hostility, because she said 5 years later they don’t keep in touch anymore.

Reddit are no different meanwhile. Leaving aside the posts we saw earlier accusing her of being disgusted at lesbians (after they insisted her character was gay so they could write their creepy slash fic about her.) Check out these beauties.

Again from shouting their love for her in public and wanting to appropriate her character as gay, to talking about how ugly she is and smearing her as a homophobe.

This is why they continue to hate Gina more than actual bigots. They don’t care about them, but with Gina they were so sure that she was to be THEIRS like Lucy Lawless. When she wasn’t, (she didn’t come out against them, but she wasn’t there’s completely theirs.) They couldn’t hack it and reacted again like the creep in the pub who flirts with the waitress and then goes nuts when she doesn’t go out with him.

It is also hilarious how they project onto Gina’s fans by saying that they only liked her because of her politics and hated her before. I don’t doubt some did only come to support her for that, but ultimately that is not the case for most given that Gina has continued to maintain a massive following despite being largely out of work for half a decade.

Her recent fight with Ronda Rousey, 5 years after she last played Cara Dune was the most watched MMA fight in history.

See here.

On top of that Gina Carano.Net was among the top ranking celeb sites in 2024 and 2025 where she literally did nothing (because she was blacklisted.)

Also her movies continue to be big hits on various streaming sites.

As you can see there is a lot of genuine, long lasting interest in this woman, that Hollywood will simply not tap into because a bunch of entitled fans from 2020 are STILL upset that they couldn’t make her into someone like Lucy Lawless that was just for them, or for them more than anyone else at least.

I say it’s time these spoiled brats learned the world doesn’t revolve around them. It’s ironic that a lot of these sites like The Mary Sue often go on about male entitlement and incels who think they are owed women etc. I’m not saying that phenomenon doesn’t exist, but ironically the setback to Gina’s career shows that the so called liberal side of fans can be every bit as guilty of that and currently have more power to hurt women for that reason.

Whilst this entitlement certainly is a big reason the hatred for Gina continues 5 years on. There are other reasons such as.

Double Standards Against Women Talking About Politics

Whenever I see Gina’s critics says she fumbled the bag and could have had a great career if she hadn’t opened her trap. I think of this.

I do not believe we live in a patriarchy. I think that men and women face double standards in different ways and in different areas of society. To me feminists who try and make out all of society is geared towards male privilege and MRAs who try and make out women have no accountability in society, are just as wrong and harmful as each other. Both stop actual discussions about double standards from happening because people end up arguing about who has it worse.

Once again it comes down to the 1 percent vs everybody else. The elites (not to be confused with simply the wealthy, which is a different thing. A rich celeb or business man is NOT the same as the political elites.) Use various means to split us up and exploit us and naturally gender identity politics is one of the most useful. It pits half the population against one another and depending on which old fashioned idea it taps into, can be used to justify any kind of exploitation. IE men not complaining about their problems because it is seen as weak and unmanly is a good way to force men into jobs with low pay, terrible conditions, etc and not push for changes.

However with women there is absolutely still an idea of they should not talk about the big issues. (Unless their opinions match ours, in which case they can become useful trophies. We all love a strong, feisty woman as long as she agrees with us.)

As a result there is always far greater anger directed towards a female public figure when they talk about politics more than there is towards male figures from both the left and the right.

That’s not to say male public figures don’t get anything, but it is never as long lasting. One only has to look at Brie Larson and compare her to say Mark Ruffallo. She basically said that A Wrinkle In Time was not made for white men. An ignorant comment sure, as great entertainment should be for everyone, but no worse than ironically what many of her anti woke critics have said about sci fi being more for men than women.

Ruffalo meanwhile promised to get his dick out if people voted for Hillary Clinton. Yet whilst he has had some pushback, Brie had countless videos made about how awful she was, people trying to spread rumours she was an awful person to work with (when she wasn’t.) She was called a communist, a man hater, a piece of shit, had attacks against her looks, and went through a career drought for many years, though obviously not as bad as Gina. She later had to renounce ever talking about politics again to be “forgiven”.

If even famous, desirable, rich and powerful women like Brie Larson and Gina Carano suffer from this kind of double standard, how bad must it be for ordinary women?

Gina’s meanwhile is the most extreme case. At times it borders on parody it’s such a ridiculously harsh treatment and what makes it even worse is that it is from people who claim to be progressive and for women. We at least expect the “chuds” to come down harder on women, but these people? Their whole reason for being at least is supposedly to fight the patriarchy.

The Mary Sue, the supposed geek girls guide to the galaxy arguably did more to ruin Gina than any other publication.

See here.

Yes clearly it getting twice the number of viewers as the highest rated male MMA event, is not a good thing for women’s sports that are often overlooked and underfunded on the grounds that there isn’t an audience for them. That makes sense.

In spite of this constant demonization and labelling her disgraced for beep boop bop. The Mary Sue regularly praises Arnold Schwarzanegger, who by the way banned gay marriage TWICE when he was the governor of California in 2005 and 2007. Now we’re not trying to demonize Arnie here. He is by all accounts a nice guy, and to be fair he did come from a different generation and grew up in a very toxic environment and spent his adult years in an extremely macho culture.

Also he has expressed regret for this and supported the LGBT community in recent years. He even married a gay couple at his house.

Still that said if you are going to adopt as strict and unforgiving attitude to Gina for “beep boop bop” five years ago and ignore all the nuances with her character, her positive experiences with the community, call her an asshole, a dick, a terrible, terrible person, do dozens of articles attacking her and laugh at her perceived misfortune etc. Then yes that is extremely hypocritical and sexist to have a forgiving attitude to Arnie. Gina was borderline experimenting with her lesbian friend at the exact same time as Arnie was banning gay marriage.

When talking about Arnie’s history as the Governor. Rachel Leishman doesn’t even mention the ban and says his history there gives him authority on politics.

https://www.themarysue.com/dont-worry-glen-powell-got-the-governators-blessing-for-the-running-man

https://www.themarysue.com/i-hate-politics-more-than-ever-arnold-schwarzenegger-reveals-whether-hes-voting-for-trump-or-harris

About Gina saying beep boop bop 5 years on meanwhile, she is happy to keep bringing that up and not mention ANY of the nuances about the situation like Gina’s history with the community, or the disgusting abuse she was sent that made her less inclined etc. Nope it’s just this.

Hilarious that someone who calls themselves a FEMINIST would push this level of double standard.

Reddit meanwhile are no better. Look at these posts from the LGBT reddit page actually trying to excuse Schwarzanegger stripping them of their rights and rationalize it as just being for his career and saying “people can’t be given simple labels like bigots” etc.

About Gina? They spread lies that her movie Terror on the Praire bombed at the box office. It didn’t as it was a straight to streaming movie (where it was very successful.)

It had ONE night in the cinema as all straight to streaming and DVD films do. That is not the same as having a full box office run. Nobody would ever call a straight to streaming movie a box office bomb, but this same reddit page and other sites like Indie Wire spread this lie to put the final nail in Gina’s coffin after she was fired. The Mando killed her mainstream career, this lie killed her indie career as it made it look like her audience abandoned her. (Which as we’ve seen from her site and success with Ronda is NOT the case. Sadly once again people in the industry are just as likely to skim read as the rest of us, so the big flashy headlines and posts like this about it being a flop got more attention than how it actuall performed.)

Just to be clear as an aside this is NOT saying that LGBT people in general feel this way about Gina or ruined her. Sadly some of even her defenders have bought into this idea that LGBT people are enemies of Gina Carano.

Ultimately? No, your average, normal LGBT person probably doesn’t even know about this controversy. They are probably you know worrying about things like paying the rent, looking after sick and elderly relatives, etc that we all are. Also even in the online space as we’ve seen a gay guy did more to defend Gina than anyone, whilst straight guys like Steven S DeKnight trashed her.

In fact there was a hilarious incident where Ian Boothby a third rate a white, straight male comic book writer pulled out as a guest at a convention when he learned Gina Carano was going to be there.

Absolutely disgusting thing to do to someone whose career was already struggling at that point. Still just few months later Boothby was humiliated when Elliot Page an ACTUAL trans person went as a guest to a convention that Gina also attended and had 0 issues with Gina.

Elliot was there on the same two days as Gina, yet bizarrely Elliot didn’t feel the need to pull out to protect LGBT people? (More people would have noticed Elliot, a big star who has actually been in things people liked such as Umbrella Academy, not being there, than a two bit comic book hack.)

Regardless of whatever your views on trans people are. I think we can all agree Elliot Page is 10 times the man that Ian Boothby is.

Shit libs do NOT represent LGBT people as much as they would like to claim. So many shit libs are actually upper middle class white straight people wanting to virtue signal about how progressive they are. Reddit for instance is actually made up of mostly straight men.

Indeed creepy straight men love shit libs politics as it can be the perfect cover for their true personalities, as seen with Neil Gaiman, who by the way Saltierthankrayt, one of the most vile anti Gina boards on reddit adored and thought was a great man.

See here

You’d think this would humble them a bit considering Gaiman was later accused by multiple women of sexual assault. One of his accusers was a lesbian by the way. Yeah Saltierthankrayt were such great allies of the lesbian community for years praised this creepy old man who preys on lesbian women, young enough to be his granddaughter as an ally, whilst writing that Gina was a danger to LGBT people.

Meanwhile a lesbian Tonya Evinger’s night on the town with Gina.

A lesbian’s night in with Neil Gaiman.

Now you might think that’s not fair as nobody knew what a monster Neil Gaiman was and that is true to some extent. Predators by their very nature are deceptive and manipulative. However Gaiman’s work was always deeply perverted and gave off several red flags, with his magnus opus The Sandman revolving around a man who abducts and rapes a woman over and over again to get good ideas, and his punishment is that he is given so many good ideas he’ll never be able to write them all down.

I’d be lying if I said I knew the full extent of his depravity, but I did always think his feminism and wokery were fake, yet these people evidently ignored the red flags about him because he said the right things, whilst jumping on the most minor things about a famous woman. This demonstrates how dangerous shit lib politics can be as its shallow, tribal nature makes it the perfect cover for people like Gaiman.

Obviously that does not mean that plenty of LGBT people, women and other minorities aren’t conned into being part of the shit lib sphere. Naturally as it does present itself as being for them, some who don’t know any better will take it at face value. The LGBT reddit page alone is proof of that.

Still shit libs are NOT an alternative for minorities or women to the “chuds” as again let’s remind ourselves of Gina and Arnie, a white straight man’s offenses to the LGBT community and how the shit libs treated both?

Yeah clearly she deserved to be labelled the anti trans actress by LGBT reddit, whilst Arnie deserved the thoughtful measured posts from them that rationalized his actions and defended him.

Some of you might say Arnie gets a pass compared to Gina more because he is anti Trump, and some people who can’t see the bigger picture’s brains just shut down when Trump is mentioned?

Wrong. The Mary Sue and other sites like TV Tropes and reddit and even Disney have all gone easier on other male Trumpers than Gina. That’s not to say that they don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome for plenty of men too, but overall even within their derangement they still come down harder on women.

James Woods for instance is still regularly hired to be the voice of Hades by Disney despite having extreme far right politics. To be fair Woods has been blacklisted from other sources, again showing that there is a real blacklist against conservatives in general. Shit Libs don’t like conservatives because they are honest about their politics.

Still that said Woods hasn’t had the absolute complete black out that Gina did. For instance he was still able to voice Lex Luthor in superhero cartoons where as if Gina were cast as say Wonder Woman we’d get dozens of posts on reddit and X and The Mary Sue whinging about it being a betrayal of LGBT people.

Also for Disney of all companies to keep working with Woods when they still reduce Cara Dune to a voiceless cameo 5 years on in The Mandalorian Lego movie shows the double standard even in this prejudice against conservatives.

Here are James Woods comments on a couple celebrating their trans child. For the record I don’t think children should be allowed to transition, not because I think being trans is wrong. Just because it’s a big and important decision to change sex that a child can’t possibly understand. Same with marriage. Still Woods words were definitely on the more provocative side and given how extreme the people at Disney are to embrace shit lib politics, that they’ll call Gina the “anti trans actress”. What possible reason can they have to say getting rid of Gina was a business decision so as not to upset their LGBT audience, but still keep Woods on as Hades? (Again I’m not saying I want him blacklisted to be clear. I love Woods as an actor, I’m just pointing out the double standard.)

In the years after.

As for Gina returning to voice her iconic character, that you know was specifically created for her in a niche spin off project?

Again even within their insane Trump Derangement Syndrome and prejudice against conservatives they still manage to come down harder on women evidently.

Sylvester Stallone meanwhile is a die hard Trumper who donated millions to his campaign and supported him in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Yet the Mary Sue happily review his films. In fact they did a marathon of the Rambo films which are also pieces of shameless right wing American propaganda.

I am not saying you can’t still enjoy the Rambo series as action movies. I like Edgar Rice Burroughs Dinosaur novels which are racist in some parts. I obviously just ignore that and enjoy the Dinosaurs and imagination, but if you’re so obsessed with purity in your art that Gina can’t play Cara Dune (a role created for and named after her.) Then yeah don’t review the Rambo films.

Rambo 2 has the titular character return to Vietnam, stating he is in it to win this time. A scene even features the Vietnamese throwing chemical weapons on him, when in reality the Americans dropped chemical weapons on Vietnam to such an extent that parts of the country are still barren after 60 years.

The third film has him working with the Mujahadeen!

Of course you wouldn’t expect a shit lib site like The Mary Sue to have any knowledge of the background to these films as that would require actual political knowledge and an attention span. Instead they praise these American imperialistic propaganda movies because Sly has big bulging muscles.

NOTHING says I’m a feminist site, breaking down traditional gender roles better than destroying the career of a woman who broke down the barriers for women in MMA, because of beep boop bop, whilst praising actual pieces of right wing propaganda because the guy in them has big bulging muscles you can’t resist.

Even worse is The Mary Sue defending and supporting outright perverts and creeps whilst still demonizing Gina.

Neil Patrick Harris created a cake to resemble Amy Winehouse’s rotting corpse in 2011, just a few months after she died. Here it is.

Yet The Mary Sue, and Rachel Leishman in particular continue to praise him.

Funny, why isn’t Rachel bringing up his disgusting necro (as the cake was naked) cannibal fantasy the way she brings up Beep Boop Bop years later? Bizarre? Same also applies to Indiewire, Collider, Den of Geek etc, all these faux geek sites run by aging millennial hipsters that worship this pervert, yet demonize Gina.

Meanwhile want to talk homophobia? Rachel Leishman is a HUGE fan of Eminem and praised his debut album. See here.

Eminem by the way frequently wrote songs demonizing homosexuals and trans people with lyrics like this.

My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge
That’ll stab you in the head
Whether you’re a fag or lez
Or a homosex, hermaph or a trans-a-vest
Pants or dress
Hate fags? The answer’s “yes”

Homophobic? Nah, you’re just heterophobic
Staring at my jeans, watching my genitals bulging
That’s my motherfucking balls
You’d better let go of ’em
They belong in my scrotum
You’ll never get hold of ’em

THOSE are the lyrics you have memorized Rachel? Yet you are still going to tell us that Gina Carano needs to be blacklisted for half a decade to protect our trans friends for beep boop bop?

In all honesty I’m not sure your average incel forum would promote double standards THAT bad.

Even worse than that is The Mary Sue praising and campaigning for a movie of the tv show Deadwood which stars Jeffrey Jones, who was convicted of child molestation in the early 00s. The tv show hired him AFTER he was a registered sex offender and even features him in scenes with children.

Yet The Mary Sue campaigned for a film version which was eventually made, and the film hired Jones to reprise his role. They also boasted about campaigning for it.

So to sum up The Mary Sue again got the face of women’s MMA blacklisted and tarred, but actually got work for that lovely Jeffrey Jones guy.

No mention of Jones, yet they actually frequently call Gina Carano disgraced (a word that normally gets used for guys like, well Jeffrey Jones, or you’d think people who hire him and include him in scenes with children, but no The Mary Sue think it’s appropriate to call Gina that and praise the latter.)

All I can say is I can understand why the majority of young women reject feminism these days.

Of course it’s unfair to tar all feminists with the same brush as these hypocrites, but when shit libs try and appropriate these labels and associate it with them to make themselves immune to criticism. They end up destroying the label’s credibility for the masses. (Again see how the phrase woke became a dirty word.)

Their treatment of Gina alone shows them to have 0 standards or awareness in their arrogance of how they can end up pushing worse double standards than the “chuds” they look down on.

In some ways I feel most sorry for fangirls. They really have nobody in their corner. At least fanboys do have the “chuds” as they are known. Granted the anti woke side aren’t always as sympathetic to the wrong kind of man as they would have you believe, but at least they aren’t pushing the most insane double standards against male performers like the supposed liberals are to women.

Cowardly Activists

History’s greatest monster according to some.

Plenty of modern fans and writers in geek spaces (and other areas) are paper tigers. They love to paint themselves as brave, virtuous radicals. The type of people who if they’d been born in the 60s would have marched with Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.

Sadly in reality they are complete cowards or too lazy to ever be that type of person, so they will zero in on easy targets and hammer them as much as they can to look big.

A recent example of this is the backlash against Ed Sheeran for cancelling Macklemore after he spoke out against Israel and Pink for her views on Israel.

Now I want to make it clear that I have 0 sympathy for Sheeran and Pink. Leaving aside the fact that I strongly oppose what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. I also think Sheeran was a backstabber for abandoning his friend in his time of need and Pink also tried to whip up a mob against Macklemore too. Her falling victim to another mob in some ways is poetic justice.

Still it does make me laugh all these free Palestine people going after what are easy targets to boycott, like individual singers and not big companies whose reach is more widespread. Boycotting the latter requires too much effort and in a lot of cases people like Rachel Leishman and these other millennial hipster professional geeks on sites like The Mary Sue, Screen Rant and Indiewire might want to climb the ladder and get in with these companies.

As a result the likes of Disney who by all rights, all of Sheeran, Pink and certainly all of Gina’s critics should boycott 10 times as much, instead say nothing against or outright PRAISE.

Here is Disney’s history.

Their founder Walt, shopped people in during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 50s, which was basically the cancel culture of its day, but was aimed at left wingers. It destroyed many lives and careers. Disney’s treatment of the actress who voiced Snow White was also even by the standards of the time awful.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&rct=j&url=https://time.com/3513597/huac-hollywood-hearings/&ved=2ahUKEwiz9YukjPiWAxUaRkEAHdeaM7UQqYcPegoIAggACAAIIhAC&opi=89978449&cd&psig=AOvVaw1vM_b0Qw5Une7AOq4cmog_&ust=1789819749030000

Meanwhile in the modern world Disney is carrying on its founders penchant for right wing politics and gross double standards. Saudi Arabia have five million shares in Disney, whilst Disney has also built a theme park in Abu Dhabi. Both countries still persecute homosexuals. In fact homosexuality is illegal in Abu Dhabi, meaning that yes all of Disney’s queer fans who hilariously were duped into seeing Gina as the devil, won’t be able to go to this version of Disney land.

But by all means tell me how Gina Carano being fired was just business to protect their image as LGBT friendly?

Disney have also donated 2 million to Israel. I will give them their due they are so corrupt, they don’t care if their backers are extreme Zionists or extreme Islamists. They’re like Wolfram and Hart from Angel.

In addition to this Disney has also stiffed families of those killed by their theme parks, bullied a grieving father out of paying tribute to his dead 4 year old son (because he wanted to put a picture of Spider-Man on his son’s grave and they own the rights and couldn’t make money out of it.) They also hired Daniel M Petrocelli, the guy who got Weinstein off with attacking women by slut shaming his victims and bribing them.

Also Disney has had severe problems in the past with the number of child molesters it hires.

See here

And to think some of Gina’s smug critics actually try and say she was harming their image from a business perspective. Hey Steven S DeKnight, what did she fuck around doing that was worse publicity than this?

https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/14/us/theme-park-employees-child-sex-stings

Tell me why with all this in mind is Ed Sheeran more of a target than Disney? Never mind their other sins, on Palestine alone Disney have donated millions to Israel rather than simply give into a mob like Ed Sheeran did. Surely that’s a bigger outrage?

The reason again is because a lot of these poseur activists don’t want to give up their crappy Marvel or Star Wars series. How would The Mary Sue cope if it couldn’t get scoops on the latest Marvel or Star Wars drivel? No more lame podcasts from Rachel Leishman about her “daddy” Pedro Pascal, no possible climbing the ladder to get a job hosting a crappy Disney behind the scenes show etc.

That’s too much to give up, but a single author like JK Rowling, or a single actress like Gina Carano, yeah that’s fine. They can be sacrificed to show how woke we are. Just don’t ask me to actually do anything beyond a few nasty comments from my armchair.

Now fair enough I’m not saying that all these people should boycott any piece of entertainment made by all of these companies. Sadly the entire entertainment industry is corrupt and rotten to the core so there is an issue of you’d never be done. The BBC are every bit as bad as Disney in all regards for instance. However we should be working together to try and hold these companies accountable in various other ways and bringing about a change in that respect. We certainly shouldn’t be supporting an image of them as inclusive as Gina’s critics like Steven S DeKnight and TV Tropes do when peddling the laughable claims that she gave them bad publicity more than bullying grieving fathers or pouring millions into the worst regimes on earth.

However again that would take too much work, so bullying individuals is the easier, more cowardly alternative.

Shared Madness and Cruelty

It makes sense that Gina as this post shows has a respect for Amy Winehouse as she was another talented, inspirational, in some ways pioneering woman whose potential was wasted by short sighted cruelty in the media.

There is a phenomenon where ordinary people can lose their basic decency if they are told “it’s okay to join in.” Call it shared madness, shared cruelty or just guilt free bullying.

There is clearly a nasty side to human nature in general. I’m not pessimistic. There are also many great aspects to human nature in general, but this is an ugly one that most people aren’t ready to admit about themselves.

Deep down lots of people want to bully for various reasons. A chance to vent their frustrations, a chance to feel superior to the perceived lesser person, a chance to belong to a mob etc. Normally however basic decency stops people from giving into these dark urges, until they are told by a figure of authority “no it’s okay to do it to this person.” When such a feeling is allowed to build around one target it can often go beyond simply shared cruelty and reach a level of shared madness and delusion. Ironically people’s guilt and remorse stop them from admitting they’ve taken part in something horrible, so they do lie even to themselves that their target is a truly awful person that deserved it.

For all people claim to hate the mainstream media, they still often decide acceptable targets. This phenomenon is certainly not limited to women, but public female figures do tend to get the worst of it. Perhaps it’s because in some ways society does tend encourage greater sympathy towards women overall, that people get excited at the prospect of breaking the norm and have more pent up frustration to vent? That’s not to say the women have it easier all around in society, as with greater sympathy also comes greater limitations and condescension as they are viewed as weaker. There is great entitlement for women to be grateful for our sympathy, and anger when they are not. (As seen with Gina.)

Again it’s always better to have a more nuanced view on gender inequalities where you’re willing to admit that in some cases one gender might have advantages the other doesn’t, but that can also lead to drawbacks in other areas too.

Whilst this may be a sore spot for me. Amy Winehouse was a prime example of this shared madness/cruelty being particularly harsh to a public female figure. The treatment she got in life because the media said she was free game due to her addiction was utterly obscene. Those born after her sad passing, and even those who lived through her career, but didn’t see the abuse are still shocked when you tell them what actually went through.

From Neil Patrick Harris’ corpse cake, to the gloating that happened when she died, to people taking bets on when she would die. An entire website was set up with the tagline “since the world is benefiting from her death, you should too.” There was also a video game titled Amy’s Autopsy where you could cut up her corpse, she was voted ugliest woman many times and there were remarks on mainstream television about how she was so ugly blind men wouldn’t fuck her etc.

See here.

https://www.eonline.com/news/255108/sick-woman-wins-ipod-for-predicting-when-amy-winehouse-would-die

https://www.christianpost.com/news/woman-wins-ipod-for-correctly-predicting-amy-winehouses-death.html

Now nobody is saying you can’t criticise Amy Winehouse, or Gina Carano for that matter. Still it’s fair to say this backlash against Amy went beyond simple criticism of her music or lifestyle even just nasty making fun of her looks, which I always think is a nasty low blow.

All forms of decency went out the window for this women. The media said things that would even at that point be considered utterly unthinkable about anyone else like promoting a site where thousands actually wanted a young woman to die! That’s quite frankly barbaric cruelty, yet because Amy was deemed an acceptable target due to prejudices against mental health, it was okay to join in.

15 years on you’d never get people treating Amy that way today as there is a greater awareness of mental health struggles, but that doesn’t mean the desire for guilt free bullying has gone. It has simply shifted to other kinds of acceptable targets of which Gina for reasons we’ve explored is now an example of.

This is not to say Gina and Amy’s situations are exactly the same. Both endured this horrible treatment in wildly different eras, for different reasons, but ultimately you can see a similar lapse of common decency. Just as vile comedians like Frankie Boyle and rags like Maxim couldn’t muster up any sympathy for Amy when she was in severe mental distress, cutting herself, walking down the street with her arms practically mutilated. Then the likes of The Mary Sue, TV Tropes, Reddit can’t muster up even the tiniest bit of sympathy for Gina being stalked by drones, abused for her looks, or being driven to cut herself either. She can hold up her arms covered in scars in interviews and they just write it off as “she brought it on herself” which was EXACTLY what used to get said about Amy.

The only good thing about shared madness/cruelty is that it eventually ends. As seen with Amy, it’s now universally accepted that the way she was treated was utterly despicable and those who took part in it like Neil Patrick Harris are still every now and then forced to issue apologies (though evidently not by the likes of The Mary Sue.)

https://style.news.am/eng/print/109346

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/neil-patrick-harris-amy-winehouse-apology-1235268789

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/apr/12/amy-winehouse-the-spiteful-way-she-was-treated-still-fills-me-with-rage

With this in mind one wonders how people will react in 10 years time when they look back at what Gina Carano actually went through which leads to our next and final point.

Stubbornness In Not Being Able To Admit They Were Wrong

Many of Gina’s critics contrary to their behavior are not stupid. They can clearly see now with the benefit of hindsight how appalling their actions were and how special Gina is as a performer. Whether you like her or not, it can’t be denied she has already made her mark on the entertainment industry in so many different areas. From sports to sci fi. (Two areas that don’t often overlap LOL.)

People are going to remember and idolize her no matter what. The likes of The Mary Sue and Reddit and all the others are in real danger of being remembered as villains in her story. Being the bad guy in someone else’s story is a bad fate in general, but to be remembered as the villains in a strong, groundbreaking woman’s story, and because you were in the thrall of a crooked company with ties to Israel AND Saudi Arabia? That’s the worst fate these people whose entire schtick was being more progressive and forward thinking than the “chuds” could ever imagine.

It’s a fitting punishment in a way for not actually being true to the ideals they claimed to support.

Still with this in mind they will come down 10 times as hard on Gina Carano to try and permanently blacken her name or erase her from history.

Partial proof of this is the fact that so many of them I have had dealings with online have always deleted my posts defending Gina or blocked me without any rebuttal. What are they afraid of? If I am the village idiot as they claim, why not let me rant into the abyss and have a good laugh? Why delete and sometimes not even post my comments?

Rachel Leishman blocked me when I brought up her hypocrisy in supporting Eminem and hating on Gina. Ironically if I’d made an actual sexist remark to her she probably wouldn’t have blocked me. All her Christmases would have come at once as she could have virtue signalled about the chuds, but in my case there really was nothing she could have said.

“Yes I think the guy who explicitly says ‘hate trans a pants, the answers yes’ is not transphobic, but Gina is for beep boop bop.”

Similarly why do you think Reddit banned me for life?

Wikipedia meanwhile will NOT budge on Terror on the Praire. They continue to spout the lies about its box office performance no matter how many times I correct them and point out the obvious biases and how they NEVER mention the box office for other straight to streaming or DVD films. It falls on deaf ears and I have been banned there.

Ironically they all just end up damning themselves as here is the thing. If Gina Carano doesn’t ever work again. If she decides to retire, when she was on the cusp of mainstream work, then yes in 20 years time her haters will be as despised as Amy Winehouse’s are now.

Future generations will still come to her existing mainstream work, women in MMA will still revere her as the original and think “she was brilliant, why wasn’t she in more, why wasn’t she a major DC or Marvel character, she looked like she walked off of the comic book page.”

When they read the truth on articles like this which will come out eventually. (You can’t hide the truth forever and look how much damning evidence there is against her critics? If a bum like me can find all of this, anyone can.)

Future gens will absolutely DESPISE people like Leishman and sites like Reddit and Indiewire. All their virtue signalling about things like a female Doctor Who, or Captain Marvel will be overshadowed for fans of female heroes by the fact they destroyed the most convincing female action hero.

Ironically however if Gina does make a comeback. No one is saying she has to be the biggest star on the planet, but as long as she goes back to where she was, where she gets steady work in solid, credible b-movies and some mainstream attention, and can at least be put forward for parts like Wonder Woman, She Hulk, Big Barda etc without someone bringing up drama from 2021. Then her fans like me, won’t care about this backlash at all. We won’t even mention it. Why would we? Her haters will actually get away with it.

Obviously it will always have been a horrible thing that happened to Gina, and I certainly will never take the likes of The Mary Sue and Indiewire’s opinion on anything seriously again. Still we won’t be writing articles about it or getting into arguments, as Gina will be back. Also even the dry spell probably won’t be remembered as hey plenty of actors go through dry spells.

Compare Lee Van Cleef with Amy Winehouse? Van Cleef famously went through several years of blacklisting, but in the end few remember that because he later did his best work after the blacklisting and his potential wasn’t wasted.

With Amy however people ARE still bitter about her treatment, because her story ended badly and her talent was wasted. Gina’s doesn’t have to be. Her story is still ongoing and she could easily be Lee Van Cleef which again would result in her critics shameful behavior being largely forgotten.

Sadly however in that respect her critics are too short sighted and believe they can keep grinding her down and if they succeed, well they’ll have dug their own graves in terms of being remembered alongside Amy’s bullies in the media as the ignorant, elitists who cost us a great female talent.

It’s up to them. Maybe, just maybe they can get over a woman not having a parasocial relationship with them from 5 years ago, and examine their own prejudices and not be willing to throw people under the bus to make themselves look good?

Nobody even wants them to apologise. How could they apologise? I could care less about them, other than the fact that they are STILL trying to sabotage this woman after five years.

Of course this is not to say all of Gina’s critics are like this. There are people who were misled into hating her and are willing to listen and change their minds. My very good friend Claudia Boleyn was critical of Gina at first, but when I explained the truth she agreed she had been hard done to by the media and now retweets my posts defending her!

We’ve all been misled by the media at times. I used to hate Justin Bieber back in the early 2010s for…….. no reason at all. He didn’t do anything wrong (least of all to me.) His music wasn’t even that bad. I’m not a particular fan, but to be fair it probably wasn’t made for me. It was entirely a “it’s okay to join in” mentality that swayed me to dislike him. I hate admitting that about myself. Indeed that’s more embarrassing for me to admit that than some of Gina’s misguided critics like Claudia who genuinely thought Gina was a bigot and at least had a reason.

Still I can admit that and I try not to let that happen again. We all make mistakes, but the important thing is to learn from them, so yes if someone bought into the smears about Gina I won’t be angry, unless after it has been explained to them. They still push those lies.

Obviously even with this, many of Gina’s worst critics can’t be excused by simply being misled. The likes of The Mary Sue, Indiewire etc deliberately spread misinformation, and those who sent death threats behavior went far beyond the normal cruelty everyone is capable of. I may have disliked Beiber based on shallow herd mentality and made some bitchy remarks on facebook, but I never sent him death threats or tried to actively ruin him with false rumors.

Still as we’ve explored there is actually a way for even those vile bullies to get away with this disgusting behavior if Gina gets her acting career back and her potential isn’t wasted.

Other Factors

There are other reasons for Gina’s blacklist. Chief among them was Kathleen Kennedy’s desire to control the Star Wars brand. Her movies had been polarizing at best, whilst The Mandalorian produced by Jon Favreau in its first two series was a huge success. There was much talk of Favreau taking over the Star Wars brand. Cara was Favreau’s favourite character and he planned to make a spin off show about her, Rangers of the New Republic.

It’s easy to see how Kennedy saw Cara as the lynchpin of his Mando verse and that by sabotaging her, she could undermine Favreau’s plans. The heads at Disney went from thinking “maybe this guy knows what he’s doing more than Kennedy. He even got the young female audience we wanted with Gina.” To “oh dear he was the one that brought this Nazi, transphobic, toxic bitch into the brand”.

Sure enough Kennedy was given more control over The Mando season 3 (which naturally flopped badly.)

Still whilst I do absolutely believe this, there isn’t any concrete proof of this yet. A few have made comments somewhat backing it up including Mark Hamill of all people. I reckon that in years to come a lot of it probably will come out, but for now it’s mostly hearsay.

Unlike Gina’s critics I don’t like using hearsay as concrete proof, so I will only put it forward as a possible reason. (Again one which I personally believe. I think it was the spark that kicked the backlash off, and the other 5 reasons blew it out of proportion and kept it going for half a decade after. Still what I personally think is not the same obviously as me having proof. Something to remember if you’re reading this Rachel Leishman.)

All of these factors ultimately came together to result in the worst cancellation in recent times. It’s a damn shame that Gina’s unique talent as an actions star has been wasted because of this petty, hypocritical tribalism, but at the very least if you’d made it to the end now you know that regardless of whether you are a fan of hers or agree with her politics. The response by any measure was utterly unacceptable and that her worst critics are full of it when they claim to be offended.

Divas Dinosaurs and Demons

Near the end of last year I set up a youtube channel called Divas Dinosaurs and Demons that was designed to show case my original fiction. Sadly as I haven’t used this blog in some time it slipped my mind to share it here, but since I’ve decided to start posting again, I figured why not use this platform to further push my work?

All chapters of my stories are released on Divas, Dinosaurs and Demons weekly, and all episodes are read by professional actors, and accompanied by original covers. (Though the illustrations are made up of stock images and AI art.)

Among the actors I’ve hired to read out my stories include Joey Sourlis, Catherine Sharples, Bradley Gareth, Michael Duncan and Sophie Aldred, best known for starring as Ace in Doctor Who.

The artwork meanwhile is supplied by Brazilian artist Caio Vincicus Corsini Filhio.

Here is a link to the channel.

https://www.youtube.com/@Divasdinosaursanddemons

Please hit the like and subscribe button for the channel and share.

The current series is the Secret Life of Dionne P Nash read by Sophie Aldred.

Enjoy.

Gina Carano and Neil Patrick Harris: A Lesson in Hypocrisy

Gina Carano has recently being doing the rounds again on social media. The usual suspects, AV club, Mary Sue, and so on are celebrating her apparent downfall and bullying her in all kinds of ways from gloating over her career, to making jokes about her sex life, to poking fun at her weight. As a fan of Gina, both as an actress and a fighter, it has been hard to watch, but what makes it even more infuriating is the disgusting hypocrisy from her critics.

Never mind the fact that many of her critics identify as feminists, yet have torpedoed the career of a strong woman (because of what the media told them.) There is also the fact that other figures in the geeksphere have done considerably worse, yet not received any kind of backlash, such as Mark Hamill and Neil Patrick Harris. To be clear I am not saying that I want these figures to be cancelled, but I still find it interesting that some people who are in with the bricks get a free pass whilst others don’t. To me it shows how the so called progressive mob, are really just a nasty, upper middle class clique who love dominating the genre and having the power to finish people, but don’t have any real principles of their own.

Now for those of you who don’t know what the drama around Gina Carano is, I’ll give you a recap. Carano is a former mixed martial artist champion who in the late 00s began an acting career, starring in action flicks like Haywire, In The Blood, and Scorched Earth. In 2020 she landed a role in The Mandalorian as the bounty hunter Cara Dune. Her character proved popular and she was even set to get her own spin off. Sadly however it came to an end when she made several comments that were deemed unacceptable by the woke mob, who launched a smear campaign against her which led to Carano being fired. The media has always reported it as Carano getting fired because she made comments that were both racist and transphobic, and clearly all of the supposed, die hard leftists and anti establishment types who hate her, ultimately just went along with everything the actual racist, right wing, mainstream media said. (Curiously however almost none of them will ever answer you when asked to provide ONE thing she said that was racist.)

What actually happened was Gina Carano refused to endorse the group Black Lives Matter as she did not want to get involved in politics (ironically). For this she was smeared as a racist. The mob on twitter then demanded she put her pronouns in her bio to make up for it. She said she didn’t want to as she found that to be a creepy way for the media to label how many minorities they have hired to make themselves look good, and I agree. She has also made it clear that she has 0 problem with trans people or gay people. Contrary to popular belief she has never expressed any TERF opinions online and she was actually best friends with a lesbian woman for years, specifically her MMA rival Tonya Evinger. There were even rumours of the two having an affair, as they were spotted on numerous nights out together dancing at gay bars, though Evinger did confirm they had kissed many times, she also stressed that nothing happened beyond that.

Only a gay hating conservative monster would befriend a lesbian, go to gay bars with her, kiss her and roll around in bed with her.

Following the backlash to not listing her pronouns, Carano put beep boop bop in her bio to ridicule her critics to show how meaningless it was, which they then stupidly used as proof that she hates all trans people. After this Carano was then criticised for claiming that the 2020 election was rigged and for stating anti vaccer beliefs.

The final straw came however when she compared her political rivals to Nazis trying to dehumanise her and others they disagreed with.

Now to be clear I do not agree with Gina Carano’s opinions about the election, vaccination or her rivals being like the Nazis, but there is absolutely nothing wrong morally in anything she said. Thinking that an election was rigged? Ironically all of Gina’s critics did this for 5 fucking years about the 2016 election, with all the bogus Russiagate crap. Hell they are still doing it!

Similarly whilst I am vaccinated, given the absolute arse the government on both sides of the Atlantic made of the COVID situation, whether it was Trump, Biden, Johnson or Sunak, I can understand people not trusting them.

Finally comparing your political rivals to the Nazis whilst hysterical and over the top is hardly racist. Again it is ironically something that a good chunk of Gina Carano’s critics have done again and again about their own political rivals, such as Donald Trump!

See here.

Based on this Sarah Silverman is clearly an anti semite, as according to Gina’s critics, comparing people you don’t like to Nazis is supporting Nazis.

As you can see Gina Carano did not at any point express any racist or transphobic/homophobic views. In fact she isn’t even that right wing. Ironically she has actually taken more genuinely left wing positions than a lot of her critics. For instance, she was partying in gay bars ten years ago when it was less socially acceptable or trendy for celebs to show solidarity with LGBT people. Carano has also publicly expressed support for Julian Assange, a journalist who for the past 11 years has been persecuted by the American government for exposing America’s war crimes. Assange’s persecution and subsequent imprisonment is a threat to honest journalism and future attempts to expose the American war machine for what it is. Yet the supposed Nazi loving, right wing extremist Gina Carano is the one to use her platform to talk about this, whilst the Mary Sue (one of the websites that led the backlash against her.) Is moaning about why some people don’t like She Hulk? The only right wing thing you can accuse Gina Carano of is working with Ben Shapiro. Now in all fairness I dislike Ben Shapiro greatly, but to be fair to Gina, A/ he is the only person who will work with her after her thought crimes, and B/ as much as I may dislike him, he is hardly worse than anyone in mainstream Hollywood. Shapiro may have disgusting views about health care and gay marriage, but he hasn’t protected sexual predators like Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein and he also hasn’t bullied a grieving father out of placing a Spider-Man picture on his sons grave because he couldn’t milk every cent out of the character, like Gina’s last employers, Disney did.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/disney-refuses-permission-boys-spiderman-17444020

We also all know that Walt Disney has never EVER been embroiled in any controversies about racism or insane anti communist paranoia either.

The great irony is that Carano, is everything the Mary Sue and many of her critics claim to want to see. She IS a genuinely strong woman, who was a pioneer in a male dominated area, Mixed Martial Arts, who was actually supportive of the LGBT community in less enlightened times, and calls out American imperialism. I also find it ironic that her movie, Terror on the Prairie which her critics have laughed at over its perceived failure, also does represent a woman starring in what is normally a male led genre, Westerns.

Sci fi and fantasy, that feminist websites like The Mary Sue love to demonise as a boys only club, have actually always had a strong female presence. From Lucy Lawless to Sigourney Weaver, to Sarah Michelle Gellar, countless women have been able to make careers in this genre, whilst Westerns truly are almost exclusively dominated by men. The Mary Sue however will demand that everyone like an obviously shit female led sci fi show like Jodie Whittaker era Doctor Who, because it’s important for representation in this genre(despite the hundreds of genuinely popular female led sci fi shows and films before Jodie.) Yet here one of the few female led films in a genuinely male led genre, should be boycotted and laughed at?

To me all of this rank hypocrisy smacks of an elite mob in Hollywood having control over the sci fi and fantasy genres and using identity politics to silence their critics. Sadly a lot of genre fans, clearly don’t think for themselves when it comes to politics or are too scared of being in the firing line themselves, so they go along with what the elites tell them. “You say Gina is a racist, well okay that’s that then. I won’t bother looking into it, or thinking for myself, my tribe says she is a racist and that’s that.”

The real lesson to learn here is anyone who is even the tiniest threat to the elites in the industry’s narrative, even if it is a woman must be stamped out and crushed. Gina became a threat the second she didn’t do something they wanted, endorse BLM. She didn’t actually criticise BLM, just the fact that she didn’t say “how high” when they said “jump” was in the elite’s eyes a threat as it meant that their hold might not be as ironclad as they thought.

It absolutely was never about protecting trans people, or calling out racism. Conclusive proof of that is that people who do dance to the elites every whim have got away with far more offensive and disgusting remarks and actions than Gina Carano.

Neil Patrick Harris for example an actor known for starring in a number of popular television series, and who recently landed a big role in Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary, back in 2011 created a cake done up to look like Amy Winehouse’s corpse, which he not only showed off at a party, but posted online for the entire world to see. This was just a few months after Amy’s tragic and untimely passing.

Harris’ disgusting actions were sadly typical of the treatment Amy got from the media at the time. She unlike say Jodie Whittaker (who was largely criticised for her awful performance and the politics she brought into her casting) was a victim of a misogynistic smear campaign. Amy was regularly called ugly, crack whore, junkie slut, and was mocked for both her weight and her mental health problems regularly in the mainstream media, not just in a few youtube videos.

Harris was clearly trying to cash in on that disgusting attitude at the time, though it backfired somewhat in that his cake was too much even by the fucked up standards of 2011.

Now again I can’t stress this enough. I do NOT want Neil Patrick Harris to be fired from any job or blacklisted. As much as I hate him for that cake, at the end of the day free speech must apply for everyone. Also whether Harris is a disgusting person or not, should not have any bearing on his talent as an actor. Unless he is actually a danger to anyone on set, or a criminal of course, which he is not.

However that said, what he did was obviously worse than anything Gina Carano said, yet these same websites that have relished in Gina Carano’s supposed downfall, praise Harris constantly?

Here is the post that finally did Gina Carano in that these websites use as proof that she deserves to be bullied and laughed at.

Here meanwhile is what Neil Patrick Harris did that evidently doesn’t bother them at all.

Here is how sites that care so much about toxicity in the genre, and promoting women view Harris after doing this.

From the AV Club

https://www.avclub.com/neil-patrick-harris-celebrity-cameo-harold-and-kumar-1849453061

https://www.avclub.com/neil-patrick-harris-doctor-who-russell-t-davies-1849055202

https://www.avclub.com/lets-revisit-neil-patrick-harris-incredible-opening-per-1835336051

The Mary Sue

Who Is Neil Patrick Harris Playing on ‘Doctor Who’!?

Neil Patrick Harris Says Ncuti Gatwa Will Be the First Gay Doctor in ‘Doctor Who’

Rachel Leishman is a writer for the Mary Sue who has written dozens of articles attacking Carano, slating her as a fascist, gloating over her perceived failures etc. At this stage she is practically Carano’s stalker. Here is what she thinks about Neil Patrick Harris.

https://culturess.com/2017/01/23/a-series-of-unfortunate-events/5/#

Indiewire

https://www.indiewire.com/2022/12/neil-patrick-harris-bob-chapek-joke-disney-world-1234793800/

https://www.indiewire.com/2021/01/neil-patrick-harris-straight-actors-gay-roles-sexy-1234611219/

We Got This Covered

https://wegotthiscovered.com/tv/doctor-who-fans-have-some-ideas-who-neil-patrick-harris-could-be-playing/

You can see how they all either love him, or at least don’t care enough to slander him, bring up his past, and are happy to celebrate his career and role in Doctor Who.

When it comes to Gina however?

The Mary Sue

The Mandalorian’s Gina Carano Getting Fired Is Consequences, Not “Cancel Culture”

It Hurts That Gina Carano Ruined The Mandalorian’s Cara Dune for Me

AV Club

https://www.avclub.com/gina-carano-ben-shapiro-terror-on-the-prairie-star-wars-1849979835

I guess tweeting stupid shit, doesn’t apply to their buddy Harris and his corpse cake pictures. By the way, the AV club lied about the movie’s box office returns.

Media Straight-Up Lies About Gina Carano’s Box Office Clout

Indiewire

https://www.indiewire.com/2023/01/gina-caranos-new-ben-shapiro-produced-movie-is-somehow-still-too-woke-for-some-right-wingers-1234800153/

We Got This Covered. Now in all fairness they did bring up Harris’ cake in a previous article, but it wasn’t anywhere near as judgemental as their articles about Gina, and after bringing it up once, they have never done so again. With Gina however?

https://wegotthiscovered.com/celebrities/gina-carano-attempts-to-gloss-over-her-antisemitic-history-with-international-holocaust-remembrance-day-post/

They seemed to forget about this didn’t they? I mean yeah they mentioned it once, in a very neutral, non judgemental way before going back to kissing Neil Patrick Harris’ arse. Even though this was something he actually did, unlike Gina being anti semitic.

https://wegotthiscovered.com/celebrities/controversy-magnet-gina-carano-unironically-calls-for-humanity-to-be-gentle-with-one-another/

https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/gina-caranos-new-movie-labeled-too-woke-for-some-proving-we-live-in-the-strangest-timeline/

Stephen King, the famous horror writer who again is praised, particularly for his politics on We Got This Covered, actually DID praise a Nazi, Stepan Bandera as a great man. He also expressed extremely bigoted views towards Russians, stating that they were too stupid to enjoy his books and that he was superior to every Russian writer.

Meanwhile for calling an actual Nazi a great man, We Got This Covered who claim the internet never forgets, did completely forget or turned a blind eye to King’s pro Nazi beliefs.

https://wegotthiscovered.com/celebrities/stephen-king-dusts-off-an-old-meme-to-weigh-in-on-george-santos/

Mark Hamill, best known for playing Luke Skywalker and voicing the Joker in numerous Batman cartoons, has also made some ridiculous political comments over the last few years, which could easily be interpreted as being more offensive than anything Carano has said.

Now for the record I am a huge Mark Hamill fan. (Showing I am not being biased here.) Mark Hamill’s performance as the Joker to me is one of the all time greatest villain performances in any medium. I have not only praised his performance throughout my entire life, but I was also the one who set up the petition to get Mark to play the Joker in the animated Killing Joke, which he endorsed! Sadly the film didn’t quite turn out how I’d hoped. Basically like everyone else, I disliked the opening 30 mins with Batgirl and Bruce bumping uglies, but I loved the actual adaptation and Mark’s performance. In hindsight however I am glad it was made in spite of the controversy, as in light of Kevin Conroy’s tragic and untimely death, it marked the last serious production in which he and Hamill were together as Batman and the Joker, with the final few mins representing some of their best work together.

Still whilst I will always be a fan of Hamill and I think he is a great guy overall. When it comes to politics he has been very guilty of jumping on the current thing, without really thinking. The worst example of this was in a recent interview where he stated that Ukraine was the first country since World War 2 to be invaded. This completely ignores all of the countries the US has invaded and destablised and destroyed, like Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Korea and Chile.

I personally think Mark just said something stupid without really thinking, (showing you can be a great man in some ways, but not others.) Some political commentators did however argue that Hamill’s comments demonstrated ignorance of countries like Iraq simply because they were not white. Again I disagree with that sentiment, but still if you can extrapolate that Carano was undermining the horrors of the holocaust, then you absolutely could say the same thing about Hamill in regards to the Iraq War, the Vietnam War and the Libyan Crisis.

Again obviously I don’t want Hamill cancelled, but if Gina Carano should be for apparently trivializing one tragedy from history, then why does Hamill get a free pass for outright ignoring other atrocities?

The absolute worst example of sites like the Mary Sue and the AV Club’s hypocrisy and someone getting away with far worse than what Gina Carano did, however is their welcoming back James Gunn with open arms after his dodgy past was exposed. Back in 2009 and 10 Gunn made numerous jokes about raping underage boys, and sharing child porn online. As soon as these tweets were unearthed when Gunn supported the cancelling of Roseanne Barr, the director was briefly cancelled by Disney and fired from working on Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (after having directed the first two.)

After a backlash from both fans and Gunn’s co-stars however he was reinstated and the Mary Sue have since forgotten about his past tweets and have actually supported his work, including Guardians 3, The Suicide Squad, and taking over DC comics films and television series.

Here by the way are the tweets Gunn made circa 2008 – 10.

Now in all fairness to Gunn, these posts whilst disgusting are no worse than the types of jokes that we have seen in tv shows like South Park and Family Guy (which made a pedophile a recurring character for shock value.)

Given that Gunn’s jokes were on a public platform, and weren’t something he was posting in private. It is most likely he was just trying to be provocative like both of those series, though that does not mean you can’t criticise all three for this type of comedy. Still whilst I absolutely would not say that this is proof that Gunn is a predator, or a cancellable offence. At the same time for the Mary Sue to actually claim that Gina Carano’s posts are more abhorrent, or that her not putting her pronouns in her bio is more offensive than Gunn making blowjob jokes about kids is utterly obscene.

Here is an article by Rachel Leishman, Gina Carano’s own personal stalker on the Mary Sue who has written countless articles trashing the former MMA star, gloating over her perceived failures, calling her a moron, etc, talking about how excited she is about Gunn’s latest Batman announcement.

James Gunn’s Big Batman Announcement Has Me Excited About the Possibilities

The AV Club also don’t seem to mind either.

https://www.avclub.com/dc-slate-james-gunn-peter-safran-1850054186

Here the Mary Sue are actually criticising the decision to cancel Gunn.

The Suicide Squad Director James Gunn Has a Perfect Take on “Cancel Culture”

The simple reason that Hamill, Harris, Gunn and King get a free pass over everything from corpse cakes, to ignoring the Iraq war, to praising ACTUAL Nazis, is because they are in with the bricks. Harris is a favourite of the elite, Gunn shares the same politics as the Mary Sue, whilst Hamill and King at the very least go along with “the current thing” in terms of politics and both hate Trump. The fact that Carano didn’t go along with absolutely every single little thing they asked her too, was why she was demonised by the elite and cowardly media and fandom for considerably less offensive posts and comments than either Harris, King, Gunn or even Hamill.

The important thing to remember here however, is that the elite within the industry are not really left wing or progressive. They simply hide behind shallow forms of left wing politics, which they use to either rope in shallow people on the left, or cowards too afraid to call them out. It’s important not to turn towards the right completely in an effort to go against them, but at the same time never ever become such a tribal leftist that you’ll instantly go along with whatever they say, as sadly has been the case for a lot of people in regards to Gina Carano.

Why “Doctor Who Is All About Change” was a Lie

Jodie Whittaker’s final episode of Doctor Who just aired. Now I have no real interest in the 21st century version of Doctor Who anymore. As a lifelong fan of the classic era, I feel that the revival in all honesty, never really tried to be a proper sequel to the original series. It was written more like a remake, that now and again would make a reference to the original for nostalgia bait, but otherwise didn’t care much about it.

Worse in the last ten or so years the revival has gone out of its way to demolish and vandalise as much of the classic series lore and history and the Doctors character as it could, to the point where the Doctor has no key characterisation any more.

The Hartnell Doctor is no longer the original Doctor now, the Master and the Doctor are now gay lovers, the Doctor isn’t a Time Lord, etc, etc.

All of these terrible, ill fitting retcons were defended by the likes of the BBC themselves, writers like Paul Cornell, Chris Chibnall, and obnoxious fans like the youtuber Samuel Davis (who personally called me a sexist in a youtube video.) As well as forums like Gallifrey Base, Doctor Who Reddit etc. They all claimed that saddos obsessed with continuity like me just didn’t get the show, because “Doctor Who is all about change. If you object to this change, you’re the type of person who would have objected to a previously successful change like William Hartnell changing into Patrick Troughton. You have to be able to learn how to move on.”

With this in mind can someone explain to me why the makers of the revival who are so obsessed with change, have just done a special that’s entire appeal was built on member berries? Why they have for the first time ever, degenerated the Doctor and actually brought a previous actor back as the current Doctor?

Yes, SPOILERS for those who haven’t seen it yet. The rumours are true. David Tennant is the 14th Doctor now.

Personally I think degenerating the Doctor is as bad a move as changing the characters sex. I’m not quite as pissed off about it however, only because it’s hard to care about the show after all the damage that has been done in the last few years. Still it sticks in my throat because of all the abuse I received over “not being able to accept change” in Doctor Who.

Ironically at the end of the day, I actually was the one pushing for change, but it was in a way that would have actually taken the Doctor forward into the 21st century rather than tearing him down. To me the all about change argument has been proven once and for all by Tennant’s casting to be a lie used by the clique of writers who took over the Doctor Who franchise in the 1990s to justify their own inability, or lack of desire to actually write Doctor Who.

This clique is nicknamed the Fitzroy clique, as they used to congregate at the Fitzroy Pub. They include the likes of Paul Cornell, Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, Chris Chibnall, Nicholas Briggs, Mark Gatiss etc.

This quote from Lawrence Miles I think sums up how obnoxious and cliquey they could be.

But if all this monkey-posturing sounds absurd, then let’s put in the context of the late ’90s / early 2000s. You may remember a time, in the days before “Doctor Who fans” meant thirteen-year-olds, when the Virgin / BBC novels actually seemed important. The authors certainly thought they were important, and pride was their most valued possession. After all, the reason I gained a reputation as an unhealthy influence was that I broke what Keith Topping called “the unspoken code”, the Omerta-like law which held that New Adventures writers should all stick together in the face of fandom and not publicly criticise each others’ work. I say “Omerta”, but in practice, they behaved more like Medieval overlords than mafiosa: the elite have to form a united front, because otherwise, they’ll be revealed as weak, flabby individuals and the peasants will get ideas above their station. Oh, and you’re the peasants, by the way. When the new series began, those authors who were promoted to scriptwriter-level went from “overlords” to “royalty”, which is why my heartless attack on Mark Gatiss was received with the same shock as if a small-time landowner in the Middle Ages had just referred to the Prince of the Realm as a big spaz.

You think I’m exaggerating…? Then consider this. When Paul Cornell took me to task for the social faux-pas of having opinions, he seemed appalled that I was incapable of respecting the natural hierarchy, and asked whether there was anybody I ‘bent the knee’ to. Bent the knee…? What is this, geek feudalism? When I told him that I had no interest in serving or reigning, he asked me: ‘Do your followers know that?’ I found it horrifying that anyone could even think that way, and I still do.”

Lawrence Miles

Meanwhile this quote from Russell T Davies himself backs it up.

I do worry about being surrounded by yes-men. You’re right, it happens. […] I don’t think it’s happened to me yet. In the end, just as good writers are hard to find, so are good script editors, good producers and good execs. When you find good people like Julie and Phil, their sheer talent cancels out the risk of them yes-ing. I suppose the danger is not RTD And The Yes-Men, but a triumverate of people who are so similar that contrary opinions don’t get a look-in.”

Russell T Davies

Finally here is an extract from an interview with Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat, which again supports Miles assertion.

Paul: The defining factor for our critics seems to be ‘how like bad television is it?’ It really pisses me off. There was a review in TV Zone recently of Kate Orman’s new book which was entirely based on that premise, how like bad television is this book?

David: And it failed.

Paul: Well of course it failed.

David: Set Piece is not bad television.

Steven: But that’s not what you want. My memories of Doctor Who are based on bad television that I enjoyed at the time. It could get me really burned saying this, but Doctor Who is actually aimed at 11-year-olds. Don’t overstress it, but it’s true. Now what the New Adventures have done, sometimes successfully, is to try and reinterpret that for adults, which has involved a completely radical revision of the Seventh Doctor that never appeared on television. That is brilliant.

Paul: There are big sections of fandom that I appreciate and love… Female fandom in all its forms has been consistently more intelligent than male fandom across the globe. Gay fandom in all its forms has, again, been consistently more intelligent than straight fandom. There’s a liberal, American, college-based fandom too. When you come down to it, our central audience doesn’t read. And that’s a major problem for us… how do we address a new series of books to an audience who don’t know what good books should be like?

Essentially Doctor Who from the 90s on, in all its forms became a playhouse for this cabal of writers, and the fandom was either bullied or duped into going along with everything they said, including the Doctor Who is all about change argument, which was never even close to the truth.

As I have said before many times, in the classic era, the Doctor was NEVER portrayed as being able to turn into absolutely anybody. All of the different incarnations of the Doctor were still meant to be the same person under the new face. This isn’t just my interpretation, all of the actors who played it said as much, as did the most prominent writers and producers involved in the classic era, from Terry Nation, to Terrance Dicks, to Robert Holmes to John Nathan Turner.

Essentially in the classic era, regeneration was an advanced form of healing. The Doctors body broke down, and then it repaired itself, and in the process, it changed its appearance. It basically rebuilt itself from scratch, and as a result the Doctors outer personality shifted somewhat. However his core personality was exactly the same from incarnation to incarnation in a number of ways. (I have already ran through the similarities in previous articles, I won’t be doing so again as it would take too much time.)

Playing and writing the Doctor was about finding the right balance of getting someone who could make it their own, but not so much you could never imagine it still being William Hartnell under the new face.

This was a good thing as it really allowed Doctor Who to have the best of all worlds. From a practical point of view it could change the lead actor, but unlike other series where the lead actor leaves, such as Primeval, and their characters story arcs have to be abandoned. In Doctor Who they could keep all of the previous actors story arcs and relationships like the Doctors feud with the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, his friendships with characters like the Brigadier, his status as an outlaw to his people etc. The change in outer personality could also allow a new actor to reinterpret the role in HIS own way, but at the same time there was enough of a characterisation to the character overall, that the Doctor still remained a character, not just a title passed on to otherwise unrelated characters. It also meant that writers could develop the Doctor as a whole over the course of 26 years. There are many examples of story arcs and character development spanning multiple Doctors, such as most notably the Davros story arc, where we see the Doctor cope with his guilt over not having finished Davros and the Daleks.

Meanwhile the argument that Classic Who had no continuity and was constantly rewriting itself is a lie that tries to back itself up by taking changes in classic who completely out of context. There is a difference between filling in a gap and changing something that is established. For instance in the case of Batman, originally he was just a crime fighter, but then it was revealed that he fought crime because his parents were killed. That was a change technically, but it wasn’t contradicting anything as we didn’t know anything about Batman’s back story or why he fought crime before that. However if another writer were to come along after and have it that Batman’s parents were alive without any explanation and reveal that his brothers murder is what inspired him. That obviously wouldn’t work.

With Doctor Who it is exactly the same. For instance, Hartnell morphing into Troughton happened when we knew nothing about the Doctors people, or his alien biology. Whilst yes, it was convenient, it wasn’t actually contradicting anything. Similarly finding out that the Doctors people were called the Time Lords, wasn’t a change, as we didn’t know anything about them before hand. The little information we did know, that the Doctor was on the run from them and was scared to go back, was still adhered to in The War Games. Finding out that his people could only change 12 times was not a change either as we were never told know many times they could. Furthermore notice how once all of these changes were implemented, much like Batman’s parents murder inspiring him to fight crime, they were never contradicted? The 12 regenerations limit remained right until the very end of the classic run. The Doctors people were always the time lords etc.

Now it’s true that there were a few retcons in the classic era’s history and a few continuity blips, but that still does not mean there is no continuity or consistency at all. Every single work of fiction will have continuity blips at some point. Similarly retcons are not pretending there is no continuity. Retcons are where you add something to an existing story, via a loophole, IE we didn’t see this part of the story, so lets show how it really went.

Alan Moore who provided something of a retcon to the Jokers origins in the classic story, The Killing Joke, brilliantly sums up how to use retcons here.

“[ The Joker has ] a kind of muddy kind of origin. They’d said that he’d been the leader of a criminal gang called the Red Hood Mob and that while trying to escape from Batman he’d swum across this river of chemicals…That was about it and this was from a story from, like, the late ’50s or something and so I thought “Okay, I won’t contradict that,” because I kind of believe in working by the rules of the material as it already exists but I can put a lot of spin on that.”

Genesis of the Daleks, which is one of the very few actual retcons in the history of the show, follows Moore’s formula perfectly. We never actually saw the origin of the Daleks in the first story, we only heard a very vague second hand account of it, written centuries later, which is why Terry Nation who wrote both stories felt he could in Moore’s words, put some spin on their origins. He repeatedly stated this in interviews, and I might add that the contradictions between them aren’t even that big anyway.

Both the first Dalek story and Genesis reveal that the Daleks, came from Skaro, were once a humanoid race who engaged in a war with another race called the Thals, which eventually went atomic and destroyed the surface of Skaro. In both cases the Daleks humanoid ancestors degenerated into psychotic, xenophobic octopus monsters, who housed themselves in robot like armour. The only difference is that Genesis reveals that Davros accelerated the Daleks mutation and in essence created them. Both are still compatible though, it’s not like one says the Daleks are complete robot creatures who live on Venus, and another states they came from earth. It’s just that in one, an important figure, Davros was edited out of history, which could have happened in the ensuing years for all sorts of reasons. Maybe the Daleks didn’t want people to know they were the creation of a lesser race? Maybe the Thals themselves didn’t want anyone to know their role in helping him? Either way it does not mean the show has no canon. I might add that once that loophole was exploited and we saw the Daleks origin up front, then that was that. There could be no third origin story of the Daleks as their origins were shown and from then on Davros is their creator.

There is a terror among Doctor Who fans, that continuity of any kind will lead to the show becoming something that only anoraks watch, which will in turn lead to it being cancelled and us going back to the wilderness years again.

Continuity however is not simply referencing the past. It is not a nerd obsession. It is a foundation of story telling. Without it you can’t do the following things, characterisation, character development, relationships, story arcs, world building, you know all the things that you expect from a drama of any kind? Classic Who had baseline continuity like any drama because it had too. The Fitzroy Clique and their commandants will single out the few continuity blips, and ignore the hundreds of other examples of tight continuity to back their claim up, like the Davros story arc, Mondas always being the Cybermen’s home planet, Skaro always being the Daleks home planet, the Doctor being exiled, him first meeting the Brig against the Yeti, Ace’s story arc, Hartnell trying to get Ian and Barbara home, Vicki knowing about the Daleks because she is from after their invasion, Daleks having time travel after The Chase, the Master having no lives left, the Sontarans and the Rutans being at war with each other, the Ice Warriors coming from Mars, Peladon, companions crossing one Doctor to another etc.

New Who from the start threw out most of the Doctors key characterisation and most of the story arcs from the original series, due to the Fitzroy Clique’s lack of interest in them. This naturally provoked a backlash from classic era fans who were instantly dismissed as sad old Dinosaurs unable to live in the present and accept change by the Fitzroy Crowd. Sadly the majority of fandom agreed with that assertion for many reasons. First of all as Miles himself pointed out, the Fitzroy Crowd often do their best to silence critics, (with the largest Doctor Who forums such as Gallifrye Base and the magazine being run by close friends of people like Steven Moffat.) Beyond that many were just thrilled to have Doctor Who back after a long absence, and the revival in all fairness was a good solid show on its own merits for the first 7 or so years. (Though its success was NOT entirely down to its own quality. It did ride high on nostalgia and also got by mostly on characters, concepts created by the original series like the Daleks, the Cybermen, regeneration, which won round the young fans.)

Still sadly as soon as the political side of fandom started to make their desire for a female Doctor known towards the end of Matt Smith’s time, that coupled with the hype from their own success, caused Steven Moffat, and later Chris Chibnall to go further than even other members of the clique. Before the “all about change” mantra was only trotted out now and again by Russell T Davies to silence “the sad anoraks” for things like having the Doctor fall in love with Rose, which was bad enough, but now it became something the Fitzroy Crowd actually believed was the only the way to keep Doctor Who fresh. Lenin once said that a lie repeated enough times eventually becomes accepted as the truth. In this case it was told enough times that even the perpetrators came to believe it!

Now to be clear I do not hate all of the political or for lack of a better term SJW fans of Doctor Who. On the contrary, Claudia Boleyn, a self admitted SJW fan, I have found to be one of the most intelligent, sweet, and lovely people in all of Doctor Who fandom. I regret some of my previous assertions of her on this blog of wanting to undermine male role models in the genre, and have learned not to be too quick to judge others in fandom as a result of my dealings with Claudia.

Still at the end of the day I don’t think that Claudia and others like her had a very positive influence on the show, only in that by their own admission they cared more about their agenda.

They wanted a female Doctor Who, simply because they thought it would be a positive step for female representation. It’s understandable and admirable of people like Claudia to want to see more strong roles for women, but ultimately a female Doctor was never a good way to do it.

As I have pointed out, if you actually DO want to carry on the original series story, then you have to maintain some kind of core identity for the character of the Doctor. Sadly I think a sex change would disrupt that core identity. That’s not to say a woman couldn’t play another hero like the Doctor, but in terms of following on from that specific characters storyline, a woman to me would be too jarring. I personally would have a hard time accepting that it was still William Hartnell under there if the Doctor were played even by an actress I really like, such as Morgana Robinson. Of course for saying this I was smeared as a sexist on sites like Gallifrey Base, but I have been consistent about not changing the Doctors personality too much right the way through in a number of ways. I objected to a romantic Doctor like Tennant, a flirty Doctor talking about his companions skirts being too tight like Matt Smith in his later years, for the same reason of trying to imagine that being Hartnell under there was too much of a stretch. (Well to be fair the last one was just crass anyway.)

The same absolutely would apply in reverse, if you suddenly turned Romana into a man, it would jar. This is not transphobic to say this. On the contrary I’d argue that it is the opposite. Trans people suffer from gender dysphoria where they feel mental anguish at being trapped in the wrong body and go through a long, painful, costly operation and process to become the gender they feel comfortable with. Making out that gender changing is like getting a hair cut, and that as soon as the Doctor physically becomes a woman, he is okay with it mentally after being a man for 100000 years, I’d argue represents a more old fashioned, dated view of gender being an entirely physical process. Hilariously enough Joss Whedon tried to mock those against a female Doctor by stating that the show never revolved around his “big old throbbing dick.” Which is an outright insult to most trans women who keep their male genitals!

The only way a female Doctor would work for me is if it were a remake and the Doctor was written as either female or gender neutral from the start. From a practical point of view there would be absolutely no problem with that, but even then ironically I actually don’t think that would be a good idea from the point of view of female representation.

To me the best form of representation is to use original female characters, as that way women have their own characters, history, stories etc, than hand me downs of male versions.

Sadly however all of these points were ignored I feel by the Claudia Boleyn mob, simply because they saw a female Doctor as too big a chance for representation due to the characters worldwide fame. Also I do think that a lot of SJWs incorrectly believe that the sci fi fandom is something of a little boys only club that needed taken down a peg or too, and again a female Doctor seemed like a great chance to stick it to these guys. (Hence why so many articles when Jodie was announced were just gloating, and why so many SJWs tend to ignore great, original female heroes like Xena, Kelly Maxwell etc who being original can’t make manbabies heads explode. I suppose just like I did with Claudia, then a lot of people on the other side were to quick to lump everyone together as just being sexist manbabies.)

Still it’s not fair to say that the SJWs caused the entire downfall of the show. Whilst I think that the focus on politics and the female Doctor were bad ideas, ultimately they did not need to lead to the vandalisation of the shows past.

IE a female Doctor doesn’t have to lead to William Hartnell no longer being the first Doctor, or the Doctor not being a time lord or anything like that.

To me it was a combination of the politics and the “Doctor Who is all about change” lie and finally the Fitzroy clique’s hold over the franchise and its fandom that collectively have brought us to where we are now. An unprecedented state of desperation where we are actually going backwards in terms of casting the Doctor.

Like I said when the push for a female Doctor really started to become great, and Moffat caved (as unlike the smelly old anorak fans, he actually cared about what the feminists like Claudia Boleyn thought as in his mind they represented the younger generation he wanted to win round.) The all about change mantra was once again used to justify the gender swap, but then I think because Moffat and others saw themselves as “on the right side of history” with having a female Doctor vs the supposedly sexist old traditionalists like yours truly. That subsequently led to Moffat and later Chibnall using the all change is good idea as their main inspiration for keeping Doctor Who fresh (and annoying the sexists) hence the hybrid story, Missy, the Hartnell Doctor being reimagined as a sexual braggard, etc.

In the end they went too far with the Timeless Children. That was a retcon a retcon so ill fitting, so poorly thought out that it pissed off everyone, as it destroyed the identity of both the original and the revived series. Even Elizabeth Sandifier despised the Timeless Children. Sandifier is a truly vile SJW fan, who told me to go kill myself. (Knowing full well I have struggled with mental health problems in the past and have actually tried to kill myself.)

Whilst the revival was always different to the original, it did maintain its own identity from Eccelston to Capaldi, with the Doctor overall in those eras being portrayed as a more romantic, tortured character. Again whilst this was always jarring for classic era fans, since the revival had been a whole generation of fans first introduction to the show, then that was the character of the Doctor for them. I also think that Matt Smith, in spite of some Moffatisms, and Peter Capaldi did help bridge the gap somewhat between old and new fans, by incorporating elements from the classic Doctors into their performances too, like in Matt’s case playing the Doctor as an old man in a young man’s body.

Jodie’s Doctor however first broke even the new who template simply by being a woman, for both male and female new who viewers. Young boys had come to see Doctors like David Tennant as more accessible role models, because they were smart and geeky, and not action men, whilst young girls had come to see the Doctor as a more attractive character. (I’m not having a go at the fangirls for that by the way. Fanboys are the same for female characters like Xena and Buffy. I don’t think the Doctor should have been made into a pin up however, same way I wouldn’t want Miss Marple to be made into a pin up for boys, and I think that both young boys and girls are capable of liking characters that aren’t presented as pin ups as well. Still I blame Russell T Davies for that mindset, rather than the fan girls who simply responded to a character that was meant to be attractive to them.)

Still the gender change already helped disassociate Jodie from both the original and the revival template, but the Timeless Children destroyed and undermined both. Russell T Davies’ last of the time lords story arc was completely undermined by it as he was no longer a Time Lord, as was Matt Smith being the last incarnation as the Doctor now had infinite regenerations, whilst the Doctors rescuing Gallifrey was undermined as it was destroyed yet again etc. New Who fans were every bit as outraged as fans like me, showing that even wit the revival, you still had to have a basic continuity and identity for the Doctor of some kind.

The Timeless Children led to the shows viewers dropping off a cliff, with one Jodie episode pulling in barely above 2 million viewers, the lowest the show has ever received in its 60 year history.

In order to get the fans and even casual viewers back on track, the likes of Chris Chibnall and Russell T Davies were forced to not only completely overshadow Jodie Whittaker in her last ever episode with a shit ton of references and cameos of old Doctors to appeal to nostalgia, but they were forced for the first time in the shows history to actually bring back a previous actor as the current Doctor.

Hilariously enough, Doctor Who has now become the very thing that the commandants of fandoms like Benjamin Cook, youtubers like Samuel Davis and the shills that ran Gallifrey Base always said fans like me who were frightened of change would turn it into.

A continuity obsessed show, constantly harking back to the past, unable to move on, and wallowing in its own mythology to the point where it looks stale, tired and appealing to nostalgia just to get by.

Doctor Who is all about a change. A ming mong, sad, smelly, anorak like me just can’t accept that and is stuck living in the past, not like Chris Chibnall or Russell T Davies who have brought back actors from 1963, crowbarred six old Doctors into a last Doctors episode, and are bringing their lead actor from 2005 back to recapture their glory days.

It’s hilarious and annoying to think that if in hindsight they had only listened to people like me, then they wouldn’t be in this mess.

My and I’d wager most classic era fans ideal version of Doctor Who isn’t one that brings back dozens of characters from the original series in pointless cameos like The Power of The Doctor. I want a Doctor Who series, where the Doctor is written in character. IE where he is an eccentric alien professor, wanting to explore the universe, played by an eccentric character actor, is a renegade time lord, is asexual, dresses in eccentric, over the top, Victorian, Edwardian era clothing etc, and the focus is on adventures, new worlds, monsters, rather than on soap opera and shallow identity politics. That’s it! Whilst I obviously want to see old villains and yes maybe occasionally old characters return, like the Daleks, Cybermen and Master, as I do love those characters, I don’t need to have them back every year. All I do ask is that when they return, you write them in character. You don’t turn the Master into either a Joker knock off like Russell T Davies and Chris Chibnall did, or a River Song/Irene Adler/Tasha Lem knock off like Moffat did. You don’t dick about with their history just for the sake of it, like Moffat did with both the Daleks and the Cybermen. You try and keep some continuity with them, see what kind of story you can write with them that you can’t with other villains etc. The Daleks and the Cybermen’s appearance in The Power of the Doctor was interchangeable. You could remove any of them and it would make no difference.

Had the Fitzroy Clique just done the bare minimum of maintaining the Doctors character and the most basic continuity, then there would have been no need to even reference the past like they have done, other than perhaps in the odd Dalek story every few years. They wouldn’t need to bring back a past Doctor to remind people that “hey this is Doctor Who.”

That’s what always happens when you deviate too far from the identity of something, eventually in order to win people back, you’ll have to remind them again and again that “don’t worry this is the same thing you liked.” How do you do that? With nostalgia and continuity porn and pointless return appearances of old characters. The exact same thing happened with Ghostbusters, that similarly went out of its way to be completely different, only to then do the most unoriginal, nostalgia driven movie with Afterlife to win audiences back.

Ironically my way was better for actually moving Doctor Who forward. Tennant’s return has set an awful precedent for any old Doctor to come back. Hey why even bother taking a risk now when you can just rely on old favourites? Even when the older actors pass on, why not just get someone to impersonate them, like David Bradley as a redux first Doctor? I doubt all the people on forums and sites like Gallifrey Base or Anoraks, or Planet Skaro or Big Glasgow Comic Con, or people like Samuel Davis who hurled abuse at me for daring to suggest that fucking about with the Doctors past for a political agenda was a bad idea, will maybe see that I was right?

Fat chance. The Fitzroy Clique it seems will have a hold over this franchise forever. It made me laugh when I saw Russell T Davies say in an interview he hopes to inspire people who see the show now as children to make it when they are older. He or one of his friends from the tavern will still be making the show in about twenty years, assuming it’s still on.

That’s a large part of why I gave up on the revival, as I realised that the people making it will use any excuse they can not to write proper fucking Doctor Who. At first during the new adventure days as the above quote from Paul Cornell shows, we just weren’t well read and too stupid to get his books. Then we were just stuck in the past, then all change was good, and that by not making it like Doctor Who they were actually making it like Doctor Who, then we were sexist manbabies. I wonder what lie they will come up with next? At the very least hopefully by doing the most unoriginal thing imaginable in bringing back Tennant as the 14th Doctor, the all about change excuse and lie can finally be put to rest.

Amy Winehouse: 10 Years On

Troubled Diva Amy Winehouse Dead At 27 – CBS Detroit

You start to feel old when the person who was the icon of your youth has been dead for a decade.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the tragic death of Amy Winehouse, arguably the most iconic and influential British singer/songwriter of the 21st century.

Though her career was short, she left behind an incredible body of work that still resonates with people almost 20 years after it was released.

Whilst today obviously marks a sad anniversary for those who loved Amy, in some ways it can also be seen as a vindication of Amy as an artist.

Here we are ten years on and there is as much interest in this woman as ever. She clearly wasn’t just a flash in the pan, and her music clearly made an impact on people.

Not only are there plenty of people who were just children when Amy died who have become massive fans, but older generations who may have overlooked her at the time as just another modern pop star in life are also discovering her too.

For almost every single year for the past decade, Back to Black has been the best selling album of the 21st century on Vinyl, which has itself made a massive comeback in the past ten years. Despite its newfound popularity Vinyl is still mostly bought by older generations. When you look at the top ten best selling albums on Vinyl ever year, they are mostly made up of bands and singers from the 20th century.

I’m not saying that younger people can’t and don’t enjoy bands and singers from the 60s and 70s. (I do!) Or that modern singers such as Harry Styles don’t make the top ten best selling Vinyl albums. However the top ten singers and bands for other, more modern mediums such as downloads, streaming, even CDs are all modern bands and singers, whilst on Vinyl meanwhile Amy has been the only 21st century artists to crack the top ten every year.

Here is a full rundown of how well Amy’s music has continued to sell across all platforms.

Here are some more examples of Amy’s enduring popularity to older and younger generations.

Aside from her music still selling well, there have also been statues and Oscar winning films made about her life in the decade since her passing.

Her influence on other musicians meanwhile is just as strong as ever on both sides of the Atlantic. Prominent British artists to emerge since Amy’s death who cite her as their main or one of their main influences include Sam Smith, Celeste, Laura Mvula, Emeli Sande, whilst artists from other countries around the world to cite her as their main inspiration include Caro Emerald, Lana Del Rey, Alessia Cara,and Millie Bobby Brown.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2311420/Amy-Winehouse-diamond-says-Caro-Emerald.html

https://www.music-news.com/news/UK/138015/Celeste-I-think-that-people-are-getting-to-understand-me-in-my-ways-and-the-way-I-actually-am

In spite of this however I can’t help but feel that many tributes, and retrospectives on this important anniversary will probably remember Amy in the wrong way to some extent.

Obviously they will all talk about her talent and impact, but ultimately I can’t help but feel they will maybe make her into too much of a victim.

Amy was treated appallingly by the mainstream media. Her death should serve as a cautionary example of how cruel the industry can be to its stars, and there are many other important issues surrounding the dreadful treatment she received such as mental health being stigmatized, double standards against women. (There is no doubt that had she been a man who lived that kind of lifestyle. She would not have been scrutinized to the same extent.) Finally there is also the hypocrisy from many of the same papers that kicked her in the teeth when she was at her lowest eb, now celebrating her as a misunderstood musical genius.

That said however it is important not to let this shameful treatment from the media, and the tragedy of her early death overshadow her talent and great musical accomplishments.

Sadly the dominant narrative is that Amy was a complete joke during her lifetime and that no-one ever gave her any time until she died. That is complete myth and sadly it has been spread by her fans. I understand why. Her fans are justifiably still upset at the awful way she was treated, and get angry when they see hypocrites like NME now praise her. I myself have focused on the awful treatment she got in previous articles I’ve written about her.

Still ultimately I think that in our grief and anger over losing Amy we have overlooked just how incredible her career was in many respects. Back to Black was one of the best selling albums in the world for three years in a row, broke numerous records in terms of sales and awards all over the world, and made Amy a household name. Furthermore all of her albums were big critical hits too, and the biggest names in music, Tom Jones, The Rolling Stones, Debbie Harry, Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox, Quincy Jones, Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga, Lily Allen, Adele, Florence Welch, even Eminem all expressed interest in working with her and admiration for her talent.

Finally in addition to this she was also cited as an influence by the likes of Adele, Lady Gaga, Florence Welch, Paloma Faith etc, when she was alive.

Whilst there were many tragic things about Amy’s life, artistically it was incredibly fulfilling. She did live to see her music be appreciated by millions of people around the world, make a sizable impact on other singer/songwriters and have the people whose music she had grown up with like Tony Bennett, Quincy Jones and even Stevie Wonder all express admiration for her.

Sadly however I’d wager you will see very few articles mentioning this today. Instead most of them will be along the lines of “how we failed Amy Winehouse.” “Amy Winehouse is a lesson for the way the media treats women.” “How could we have saved Amy”. etc, with only a passing mention of her accomplishments.

Even worse is the fact that her talent is skipped over in many of these articles too. Amy was more than just a great soul singer. She was incredibly versatile. She could cover many different genres from Jazz to Soul to Reggae and she could sing more than just sad, downbeat songs about heartbreak.

She was incredibly funny and witty and many of her songs are actually quite humorous such as “I Head Love Is Blind” and “Fuck Me Pumps.” Others are quite upbeat fun dance songs like her cover Valerie, Amy Amy Amy meanwhile is a lively sexy song.

To simply write Amy off as another tortured artist I think does her a disservice. It overlooks her versatility, her wit and amazing sense of humour, and her passion for and extensive knowledge of music which allowed her to pick out such a wide range of songs to cover. Everything from classics by the Beatles and Billie Holiday to contemporary hits like Valerie.

Obviously I am not saying that articles exploring how Amy was mistreated are inappropriate and don’t have their place, and I’d be hypocritical if I didn’t acknowledge that I have written similar articles in the past. Still I think now after 10 years we can maybe try and remember Amy in a way that she would probably rather be remembered. Not simply as a victim off the media, but also as a pioneering, accomplished singer/songwriter in her own right.

Why Gina Carano Being Fired is Modern Day McCarthyism

Image result for gina carano
We love strong women, until they express opinions we don’t like, then we’ll make sure they are never heard from again.

It was announced that Lucas Films will be dismissing Gina Carano from her role in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian after her recent comments on Instagram were deemed offensive.

Sadly it came as no surprise to those of us who had been following the controversy surrounding Carano and the vicious attempts to derail her career from self indulgent, self righteous keyboard warriors, but I think this should be the final straw for cancel culture.

Carano is ironically everything the SJWs who have ruined her life claim to support. She is a strong woman who has enjoyed tremendous success in many different forms of entertainment from MMA (where she was a pioneer for women) to film and television.

Yet now not only has she lost the most high profile role of her career, but she has also been dropped by her agent and smeared in the mainstream media by Lucas films as being intolerant of other people’s religious beliefs and cultures.

Her career is in tatters for simply expressing some opinions outside of the show on her social media accounts.

In 2020, Carano simply refused to express support for Black Lives Matter. She didn’t condemn them completely, she simply did not want to be associated with them. Whilst there are obviously problems with police brutality and racism in America, BLM have proven time and time again to be a violent and extreme organisation.

At least up to 25 people lost their lives during the Black Lives Matters riots in 2020. For Carano not to want to associate with BLM is perfectly reasonable. It does not mean that she is a racist. At no point in her entire decade plus long career has Carano ever been accused of anything even remotely racist by any of her coworkers or fans, or been shown to have problems working with people from all ethnicities.

Suddenly however because she doesn’t want to express support for a violent organisation that means she must be tarred as a racist? That would be as absurd as me saying anyone who doesn’t support Scottish independence is a racist. (Less so actually as at least the SNP haven’t been responsible for mass riots that have killed people!)

Later in the year the woke Star Wars brigade demanded that Carano put her pronouns in her profile. (It does make me laugh how the woke fans will often comment on things like “fan entitlement”. I have never seen a more entitled group of cry bullies, than those who think they can actually demand an actor in a series do something or else there will be consequences. I guess they only like strong women as long as they aren’t too strong and think for themselves like Carano.)

Ultimately Carano refused as she thought it was stupid. At no point did she say she was against trans rights, or trans people, or anything like that. (She made that perfectly clear by stating that she supports trans lives.)

By simply not sticking her pronouns in her bio however, she was smeared as a transphobe! She later lightly poked fun at her critics by writing “beep, boop, bop” in her bio which led to numerous petitions and messages to Lucas films from angry Star Wars “fans” to fire Gina Carano.

The campaign continued relentlessly for months, during which time Carano expressed her opinion that the US election had been stolen from Trump. (I personally don’t agree, but it wouldn’t be the first time someone has made such an accusation. Lets not forget the conspiracy theories that are still ongoing about Russia stealing the election from Hillary Clinton in 2016 which other actors involved in the Star Wars franchise like Mark Hamill regularly tweeted about and supported yet faced no consequences for, as they shouldn’t of course, but you can see a double standard right away.)

Carano also expressed doubt about wearing masks to combat the COVID epidemic.

Finally the killing blow to Carano’s career came when she said that in some ways the treatment Republicans are getting is similar to what the Jewish population went through in Nazi Germany.

Here is Carano’s post.

Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbours… even by children… Because history is edited, most people today don’t realise that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbours hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.

Now personally I think that she is being hyperbolic. It is true that politics have become so divided in America that people are turning on even their own family members, never mind neighbours.

Still even then it is inappropriate to compare things now to the horrors of Nazi Germany (though once again the woke brigade started this with their rants about how Trump is literally Hitler.)

Let’s all get ready to sink Sarah Silberman’s career for trivializing Hitler and the Nazis 1.2.3.4

Sadly however this proved to be too much for Lucas films and they finally caved to the irrational, bullying mob of keyboard warriors and within a few hours, Carano’s backstabbing agent also dropped her.

Here is the statement released by Lucas films.

“Her (Carano) social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable,”

At no point has Carano ever denigrated anyone based on their cultural or religious identities. At no point has Carano even discussed religion. This is a bare faced lie designed to make impartial people who might only glance at the story think that Carano has been peddling racist and bigoted comments about Jewish people.

You have to ask why are Lucas films deliberately lying and misrepresenting her comments? Could it be because if they reported what she has actually said, fair minded and rational people wouldn’t have a problem? They might not necessarily agree (which I don’t with her comments about Trump and Republicans to be fair.) However they wouldn’t want to completely ruin the woman, which is what has happened now with even her own agent abandoning her.

What we are seeing is history repeat itself, but rather than Nazism, it is a modern day reverse McCarthyism. In the 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped up hysteria in the industry and among the public against the threat of communism. Anyone with even the mildest left wing views was tarred as the most extreme thing, a communist supporter of Joseph Stalin and they were fired from their jobs and blacklisted so they could never work again.

Many prominent actors, writers and directors careers were derailed for years, or finished completely and many people’s lives were destroyed as a result of McCarthyism.

https://www.history.com/news/7-famous-victims-of-the-hollywood-blacklist

https://www.biography.com/news/artists-blacklisted-hollywood-red-scare

Hilariously and tragically we are now seeing the left do exactly the same thing in reverse in the 2020s. Anyone who expresses even the mildest right wing views, or literally doesn’t dance to the pathetic whims of some sad sack fans who think they own the franchise is ruined.

Personally I think it’s time that the cowards who constantly cave to these bullies were held accountable. I think Carano’s agent should be named and shamed in the media for stabbing her in the back during her lowest eb. Other potential clients need to see what a cowardly Judas Carano’s agent is. I also think there should be a boycott of any future seasons of The Mandalorian and anything by those who decided to both fire and smear Carano in the media as “disrespecting other people’s religions” until either Carano is reinstated or Lucas films make a public apology.

(I think Carano should sue them for their comments if they don’t retract.)

It’s not simply enough to ignore SJWs anymore. They need to be shown that they can’t just ruin people’s lives and careers. Any time their toxic influence is imposed over a franchise, that franchise needs to be made to fail. People need to see that if they try and blacklist someone for their views, they will be the ones to face the consequences.

I’m sure some people will say this is hypocritical as now I am demanding a boycott, but this is not because of opinions Lucas films expressed. Plenty of celebrities I adore express opinions I don’t like. Lady Gaga supported Joe Biden, who I believe to be a creeper, war criminal and a blow to genuine progressive politics. Not once did I even criticise Lady Gaga for that, never mind attempt to ruin her career and smear her personally as the worst thing I could think of.

Lucas films have ruined Carano’s life. Not only have they fired her (Which always in ever area, makes it difficult for someone to find work after.) But they have smeared her in the media as disrespecting people’s religions and cultures, which will stick to her reputation and make others not want to work with her. They cannot be allowed to get away with that, and they cannot be allowed to set a precedent.

That’s what the SJWs don’t seem to get. If we can get someone fired for expressing opinions we don’t like, how long before someone takes offence at something you say?

I personally will never watch an episode of the Mandalorian again unless Carano is offered her job back. (Though if I was her I would spit it back in their faces after the cowardly, backstabbing way they treated her, but at the very least they should apologise and give her the offer.)

Why Joe Biden’s Victory is a Bigger Blow For Left Wing Politics

Image
What could have been. What could have been.

I can’t believe that I was actually wanting another Trump victory (only when it became obvious Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t going to be the Dems candidate.)

It’s a testament to how bad things are when out of a country as large as America your choices are between an egocentric, failed businessman and a creepy, warmongering letch.

Joe Biden is now the President Elect of the United States and whilst many progressives over the world are literally cheering in the streets at having finally overthrown the evil tyrant, personally I think this, coupled with Corbyn’s crushing defeat in the United Kingdom is the biggest blow to left wing politics for a long while.

As we’ll see in this article, thanks to Creepy Uncle Joe’s victory, it will be a long time before we see any even remotely left wing candidate near the white house.

The truth about Joe Biden

The Joe Biden Allegations: Here's Everything We Know So Far

It makes me sick to see people praise Joe Biden as some kind of progressive champion against the official Demon, Donald Trump.

For the record I dislike Trump. His attempts to undermine Venezuela, his antagonism towards Iran and North Korea, the way he abandoned Julian Assange after praising Wiki leaks during the 2016 election and even his attempts to undermine the NHS in Britain, were all genuine reasons to want him away from the White House.

However that said when it comes to all of the issues that the SJWs accuse Trump of being literally Hitler over such as LGBT rights, civil rights, and misogyny, Biden is at least equal to Trump, if not more conservative on.

For LGBT rights for instance Trump was opposed to gay marriage for years, whilst Joe Biden has not only been opposed to gay marriage for just as long, he has also voted in favour of laws that persecuted gay people throughout his entire career.

Now in all fairness many politicians have changed their stance on progressive issues throughout their careers. Tulsi Gabbard was opposed to gay marriage for many years for instance.

However Tulsi openly admitted and apologised for being opposed to gay marriage, where as creepy uncle Joe (whose views were far more dogmatic and has done more to harm gay rights directly) has lied several times about his record.

In the 2020 debate Biden actually claimed that he was the first person of any administration to go on national television in support of gay marriage.

He even took credit for creating a widespread support for gay marriage among politicians.

And by the way, I might add, I’m the first person to go on national television in any administration and say I supported gay marriage. I supported gay marriage when asked. And so it started a ripple effect.”

The truth however is different. Not only did many Democrats and Republicans support gay marriage before Joe Biden, but Biden has helped persecute gay people in many different areas of life beyond simply their right to marry.

In 1973 Biden stated that gay federal employees were a security risk.

Biden also supported the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in 1994 which prohibited homosexuals from serving in the military and eventually saw more than 14500 homosexuals excluded from the military.

Later that same year, Biden also voted for an amendment that cut off federal funding for any school district that promoted acceptance of homosexuality as a lifestyle.

As for the issue of gay marriage in 1996 Creepy Uncle Joe also voted against gay marriage, supporting the “Defense of Marriage Act” which defined marriage as only a legal union between one man and one woman as a husband and wife. Biden was just one of 85 senators to vote in favour of the act.

Biden continued to voice his support the Defense of Marriage Act throughtout the entire 2000s, claiming that it was a state issue.

As President Bush said on a previous occasion, this issue should be left to the states. I agree. That’s why I voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a ‘union between one man and one woman’ and does not require any state to recognize a same-sex union sanctioned under the laws of another state.

You know, think about this. The world’s going to Hades in a handbasket… and we’re going to debate, the next three weeks, I’m told, gay marriage, a flag amendment, and God only knows what else… We already have a law, the Defense of Marriage Act. We’ve all voted—not, where I’ve voted, and others have said, look, marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that. Nobody’s violated that law, there’s been no challenge to that law. Why do we need a constitutional amendment? Marriage is between a man and a woman.”

In addition to this Biden also voted to block the immigration of HIV infected individuals into the US in 1993, whilst Biden and Obama also sent over 400 million in cash to the Iranian government, a country that puts homosexuals to death.

Biden meanwhile has just as dodgy a record when it comes to the ladies as Trump.

https://www.businessinsider.com/joe-biden-allegations-women-2020-campaign-2019-6

Biden’s record on civil rights is also somewhat patchy too and involves support for segregationists and the disastrous 1994 Crime Bill that deeply and negatively affected the African American community.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/joe-biden-didn-t-just-compromise-segregationists-he-fought-their-n1021626

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/17/joe-biden-race-crime-bill-1994-policing

He also hasn’t got the best track record on immigration either. Leaving aside his persecution of those infected with HIV, it was during Biden and Obama’s Presidency that the cages used to hold immigrants during Trump’s time were built and first implemented.

All of this is before we get into Biden’s strong opposition to medicare for all. Far from being on the left, Biden was able to whip up McCarthyite fears against Bernie Sanders due his left wing policies in the media and among the Democratic elite, in much the same way as the British media did against Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/10/biden-says-he-wouldd-veto-medicare-for-all-as-coronavirus-focuses-attention-on-health.html

As you can see Biden is by no means a more progressive candidate on the issues that Trump’s critics despised him over, but ironically he actually has a worse track record on other key issues like foreign policy.

Trump may have imposed sanctions and even launched some illegal attacks on other countries such as Syria, but at the very least Trump is ironically the only President not to launch a full scale illegal invasion of another country or start a war.

Though Trump only served one term, both Bush and Obama had launched illegal wars during their first term. The Iraq war which happened under Bush’s Presidency is the biggest atrocity of the 21st century, whilst the Libyan crisis under Obama saw the complete destruction of a secular Muslim country, the rise of Isis and a refugee crisis.

Nothing Trump did can compare to those two atrocities, which is why this glee over him being defeated from the SJWs comes over as very shallow and ironically insular. It seems for all the SJWs and the media’s claims of wanting to tackle racism and Islamophobia, the destruction of countries in the middle east, the massacre and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Muslims doesn’t bring as much shame to America as Trump saying something sexist to his friends 15 years ago?

This ironically demonstrates how people don’t care about issues that don’t affect their country. It makes me sick to see supposedly left wing people act as though the American President was such a sacred, beautiful, honourable position that was disgraced by an uncouth idiot like Trump.

Ironically Trump is the only President of the past 60 years not to cause an illegal war.

http://www.socialist.ca/node/1992

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/khmer-rouge-cambodian-genocide-united-states/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jan/05/fordsshame

https://www.theweek.co.uk/92389/the-iraq-war-15-years-on

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/obama-administration-wrecked-libya-generation

https://chomsky.info/1990____-2/

Joe Biden meanwhile not only supported the Iraq War, he played a key role in instigating it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-biden-role-iraq-war

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/remember-biden%E2%80%99s-role-promoting-iraq-war-bloodbath

Biden also supported the invasion of Libya as well as invasions of other countries such as Yugoslavia in 1999, and Syria in 2014 and 15.

In addition to this Biden has already, in contrast to Trump created tensions with Putin.

Considering both countries have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire planet several times over, the risk of a full scale conflict between both Nations can never be understated.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/29/putin-thanks-trump-for-tip-russia-says-foiled-terror-attacks

https://www.ft.com/content/09aff9cb-2315-438c-b283-1271264a1f2a

With this in mind Biden is certainly no alternative to Trump at least, but his victory actually represents a much greater defeat of left wing politics and progressive ideas than simply another republican in the White House.

What Biden’s Win Means For Progessives

Anti-fracking activist': Trump campaign calls out Lady Gaga ahead of rally  with Joe Biden
Love Lady Gaga, but she is definitely going to regret this. Actually no she won’t as she won’t be those affected by Biden’s opposition to universal healthcare during the upcoming recession.

With Donald J Trump, at least you knew where you stood. He was a right wing candidate who represented the right. The Democrats meanwhile are meant to represent the opposition to the Republicans, and offer at the very least a more liberal alternative.

Ultimately however the Democrats have become every bit as corrupt and right wing as the Republicans, and a Joe Biden victory has simply helped to secure the very worst hawks in the Democrat party’s power.

The Democrats needed another humiliating defeat. Their lost to Trump in 2016, evidently didn’t convince them that they needed to find a candidate more in line with the people, which Hillary most certainly wasn’t.

Biden is really no different to Hillary Clinton. Both war mongers, both flip floppers, both establishment candidates who were backed one hundred percent by the crooked mainstream media.

Two losses to an outsider candidate, which ultimately Trump was, would have forced the Democrats to pick a better candidate in 2024. They’d know that an outsider was a genuine threat, and that they couldn’t just pick a candidate that only care about their interests instead of at least some of the voters.

I’m not saying they would have picked a Bernie or a Tulsi Gabbard (though certainly Tulsi’s chances would have been better.) At the very least I think they probably have had to have picked a candidate that supported universal health care which is a very important issue for the electorate.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-progressives/

Now however thanks to Biden’s win, the Democrats have no reason to actually try and win genuine support from the electorate. They know that they can just whip up enough fear of the Republican candidate to convince people “Well at least I won’t be voting for someone who is literally Hitler”. In truth however by voting for Biden, they are voting for someone who is at least as right wing as Trump, yet is on the opposition’s side meaning that no matter who you vote for, you have a candidate opposed to universal health care and other left wing issues.

We are now further away from a candidate like Tulsi Gabbard, a genuinely anti war candidate who supported universal healthcare than we were in 2016.

Furthermore Biden’s failings will not be as scrutinised as Trump’s were. Just as with Obama, the public will become complacent again. (Don’t expect our brave, edgy comedians to comment on Biden in the same way, even if he starts another war. The Libyan crisis went almost unnoticed by the media for instance compared to Trump’s idiotic tweets.)

Trump’s victory now looks like just a fluke, rather than the people pushing back against the corruption in the Democrats party, and the influence of the mainstream media. The establishment needed two defeats to really get the message that people were fed up of not being listened too across, but now their power has been solidified.

Either the corrupt candidates in the Democrat party will know they can just whip up fear of the Republicans again in 2024, or the Republicans will win after the public’s frustration with four years of Sleepy Joe. This time however the Republicans will also not want an outsider candidate either due to Trump’s failure.

Trump as awful as he was, did at least represent a shake up of the status quo to both political parties, that someone from the outside can win if they appeal to what the people actually want, and the more the media try to demonise them, the more the people turn against the media.

Now however the Republicans are more likely to choose a George W Bush type figure than they are a Trump.

Conclusion

It’s always worse when the opposition is completely taken over by the right, than if a right wing party simply wins an election. I view Keir Starmer’s recent purge of Corbyn’s influence over the Labour Party to be far more catastrophic than a simple Tory win, as now there really is no one to vote for.

Sleepy Joe is not a progressive candidate. He is a trojan horse designed to dupe progressives into thinking that he is, because at least he’s not Trump, but ultimately he will carry on the same right wing policies as Trump, and possibly be even worse on issues like foreign policy, all the while the media will be propping him up as a great man.

Of course some people doubt that Biden will last the full term, but his Vice President Kamala Harris is every bit as corrupt and right wing.

It will be a long, long while before we get anything even approaching a candidate like Tulsi Gabbard, and sadly it felt like we were getting closer than ever. Trump’s victory was a blow to the establishment, even if he didn’t live up to his non interventionist stance.

His victory felt like the first positive step to seeing an outsider candidate like Tulsi or Bernie get in on the Democrats side, but now things have just returned to the status quo, with Trump’s victory being nothing more than a fluke that didn’t last.

Thanks for reading.

Mulan and the Hypocrisy of Anti SJWs: The Horseshoe Effect.

Mulan' Actress Liu Yifei Dazzles in Elie Saab at Premiere [PHOTOS] – WWD
A victim of right wing cancel culture.

In yet another fine example of why the foaming at the mouth left and right are exactly the same thing, the right have recently supported a boycott of Disney’s reboot of Mulan.

The reason, its leading actress Liu Yifei expressed support for the Hong Kong police against the rioters on social media.

I support the Hong Kong police. You can beat me now. What a shame for Hong Kong,”

Naturally many of the anti SJWs who are normally opposed to cancel culture, who stood up for Gina Carano when SJWs tried to get her fired from another Disney production, The Mandolarin simply for expressing a political opinion, are either as silent as ghosts for Liu Yifei, or are actually supporting the boycott against her.

See here from a youtuber named JosiahRises who is normally opposed to Cancel Culture.

Meanwhile here are his opinions about SJWs getting people banned.

I guess freedom of speech doesn’t apply for Liu Yifei whose career he has been happy to help torpedo.

Now you might be thinking that I am being hypocritical as I dislike the politics in the Jodie Whittaker era of Doctor Who and have openly criticised it, but to start with not once have I called on Jodie or any of the cast to be blacklisted and second I dislike how the politics are implemented into the series itself.

It’s not a question of Jodie said some things online that I disagree with and I won’t watch the show. I dislike the way that the politics in the series take precedence over the story, the way that characters like the Doctor and the Masters backstories are being rewritten and destroyed simply for a political agenda etc.

With Liu meanwhile the backlash against her, doesn’t even have anything to do with the film. It is simply because she expressed an opinion the anti SJWs don’t like outside of her work on the film, that they want to ruin her.

And they are trying to ruin her. They are helping to make her the fall figure for the film’s poor box office performance. I haven’t seen the film. It may be another bland, boring, pointless reboot and I certainly have no love for Disney. That’s the point however this will not harm Disney in the long run. All that will happen is that Disney will instead pin all of the blame on Liu Yifei thanks to the boycott against her comments. What other film studio will want to hire her if it’s known that people won’t even give her performances a chance because of her political opinions? She has more or less been blacklisted already. She hasn’t been judged on her acting, she hasn’t even been judged on the quality of the film she starred in.

There’s no doubt that Liu had expressed a support for the American police against Black Lives Matter, or criticised identity politics, or said there are only 2 genders and if it were rabid SJW fans like Mr Tardis Reviews calling for her to be boycotted, people like JosiahRises would be white knighting for her and calling her a badass standing up for free speech.

Essentially the anti SJWs, or the right are exactly the same as those they rally against. Both can’t stand contrary opinions. The only difference is that the left currently have more social and cultural power, so the right seem like the under dogs. Furthermore in regards to the sci fi and fantasy fandom, the left are currently the fanatics destroying major franchises like Doctor Who and Star Trek, so many otherwise impartial people will side with the right, assuming they are at least more reasonable.

In time however this dynamic could easily shift and when it does as seen with Liu anyone who expresses an opinion the right, the apparent advocates of free speech don’t like will be silenced without any hint of irony.

The smearing of Liu as a communist is also classic SJW behaviour too. SJWs will smear anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest as the most extreme thing, Nazis, alt right, misogynists etc.

(I have been a victim of this as my latest article on the toxicity in the Doctor Who fandom attests, where I was smeared as a misogynistic alt right shill on Gallifrey Base, compared to Mussolini and told to kill myself by Elizabeth Sandifier, a notorious SJW lunatic for criticising the Jodie Whittaker era.)

The right meanwhile have proven to be no better the way they smear almost anyone as a communist if they express even the mildest left wing views or contrary opinions, like Liu being critical of the protesters.

The Hong Kong protests were a somewhat complicated issue that was like many others stoked up by fake news and political opportunists.

See here.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-11/how-fake-news-is-stoking-violence-and-anger-in-hong-kong

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/26/hong-kong-protesters-accused-of-reckless-violence-over-christmas

Yet because China is seen as a communist country. (In reality its economic system is somewhat more complicated than that.) Then anyone who defends its actions in any situation like Liu must automatically be a dirty communist in the rights eyes.

Even if like Liu they are opposed to things the right claim to be against, like violent protests, fake news sowing division, then it doesn’t matter. If all of those things are applied to dirty Commies, then the right view it as a good thing!

I remember seeing Dave Cullen, a notorious right wing youtuber who spent an entire year trashing CNN for their biased coverage of Clinton and Trump, cite CNN as a reference against the Hong Kong police.

Liu isn’t the only victim of the right’s dogma however. ShoeOnHead a popular left of centre youtuber was recently smeared as a socialist/communist for simply associating with a socialist on youtube.

It’s funny that Sargon of all people who has associated with the likes of Yaron Brook,a notorious right winger who wants to destroy the NHS and Stefan Molyneux, a race realist, who has made deranged posts about women, would criticise Shoe on the basis of who she associates with.

You can see how the right have the same tribalistic attitude that the left have of you’re either with us or against us?

I’ve often said that ideologies like capitalism and socialism have replaced religion in terms of being a dogmatic cult that people will adhere to regardless of principles.

Why can’t politics be viewed in a more impartial, logical way? I wouldn’t say I am a complete socialist in that I don’t believe in handing over all power to the government. I think that in this scenario the government ends up replacing the large co-operations that are able to dominate in an unchecked capitalist environment.

I am more than happy for independent businesses that manufacture their own products to remain free. However I agree with many socialist policies like universal health care, welfare, I believe in renationalising the roads, railways, resources like gas and electricity.

I think Capitalism is extremely flawed as a system, and it has not only caused an incredible loss of life around the world, but even in the countries it is deemed a success, Britain and America, it is crashing and burning. Covid has accelerated the downfall of the system, but even before then poverty rates and unemployment were shockingly bad. (Particularly among the disabled.)

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2018/september/disabled-peoples-poverty-worse-govt-estimates

https://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/its-not-right-four-million-disabled-people-are-locked-poverty

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2020/february/nearly-half-everyone-poverty-either-disabled-person-or-lives-disabled-person

https://www.ippr.org/news-and-media/press-releases/1-1-million-more-people-face-poverty-at-end-of-2020-as-a-result-of-coronavirus-pandemic-finds-ippr

https://www.health.org.uk/publications/long-reads/living-in-poverty-was-bad-for-your-health-long-before-COVID-19

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/23/424990474/why-disability-and-poverty-still-go-hand-in-hand-25-years-after-landmark-law

China meanwhile with its more mixed economy model lifts more people out of poverty every year than any other country.

http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0521/c90000-9692508.html

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2016-12/24/content_27763449.htm

https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/china-lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-is-historic-world-bank-117101300027_1.html

https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/business/china-lifts-over-68-million-people-out-of-poverty-in-5-years-report/articleshow/62863326.cms

Now again I’m not saying there aren’t problems in China in regards to free speech and censorship. Obviously there are, but that doesn’t mean that the economic model in China hasn’t been successful. Also once again America and Britain are hardly squeaky clean when it comes to free speech. Ask Julian Assange, if he ever gets released, or hasn’t been broken by the physical and mental torture he has endured.

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3051087/100-doctors-alarmed-over-uk-prison-torture-ailing-julian-assange

For saying all of these things however I would probably be labelled a dirty communist by your average right wing shit lord, the same way the lovely people on Gallifrey Base accused me of being a disgusting woman hating alt right piece of shit.

Both view their political ideologies as religions and will defend them regardless of whether or not it violates their beliefs. Hence Sargon lambasting the left for canonizing Fidel Castro a brutal dictator, whilst praising Agusto Pinochet, a brutal dictator, or Dave Cullen warning us about fake news about Trump from CNN and then using CNN’s reports of China a proof of how corrupt it is, or JosiahRises warning us about cancel culture, whilst using cancel culture to smear and blacklist an actress who said something supportive about those pesky commies.

At the end of the day you should always stick up for what you believe in regardless of whether the cult like political mob you have chosen to associate with is for or against it. If you truly are against cancel culture, and for freedom of speech then you will have to support Liu Yifei who is as much a victim of cancel culture as Gina Carano.

I will continue to support both actresses because I am opposed to cancel culture regardless. Let’s see how many right wingers who are willing to do the same

Mulan' star Liu Yifei: Everything to know about the Chinese actress | EW.com
Evil commie bitch.

What Ruined Doctor Who: Part 5: Toxic Fandom

Paul Cornell (Person) - Comic Vine

Make sure you bend the knee.

In the past few articles of this series we explored how a certain fandom incrowd consisting of Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Gary Russell, Paul Cornell, Chris Chibnall, Nicholas Briggs (often nicknamed the Fitzroy Crowd as they all used to congregate at the Fitzroy pub) were able to slowly take over the Doctor Who franchise during the 90s when it was vulnerable, and bully their critics into silence as “Ming Mongs” and anoraks.

But if all this monkey-posturing sounds absurd, then let’s put in the context of the late ’90s / early 2000s. You may remember a time, in the days before “Doctor Who fans” meant thirteen-year-olds, when the Virgin / BBC novels actually seemed important. The authors certainly thought they were important, and pride was their most valued possession. After all, the reason I gained a reputation as an unhealthy influence was that I broke what Keith Topping called “the unspoken code”, the Omerta-like law which held that New Adventures writers should all stick together in the face of fandom and not publicly criticise each others’ work. I say “Omerta”, but in practice, they behaved more like Medieval overlords than mafiosa: the elite have to form a united front, because otherwise, they’ll be revealed as weak, flabby individuals and the peasants will get ideas above their station. Oh, and you’re the peasants, by the way. When the new series began, those authors who were promoted to scriptwriter-level went from “overlords” to “royalty”, which is why my heartless attack on Mark Gatiss was received with the same shock as if a small-time landowner in the Middle Ages had just referred to the Prince of the Realm as a big spaz.

You think I’m exaggerating…? Then consider this. When Paul Cornell took me to task for the social faux-pas of having opinions, he seemed appalled that I was incapable of respecting the natural hierarchy, and asked whether there was anybody I ‘bent the knee’ to. Bent the knee…? What is this, geek feudalism? When I told him that I had no interest in serving or reigning, he asked me: ‘Do your followers know that?’ I found it horrifying that anyone could even think that way, and I still do.”

Lawrence Miles

“I do worry about being surrounded by yes-men. You’re right, it happens. […] I don’t think it’s happened to me yet. In the end, just as good writers are hard to find, so are good script editors, good producers and good execs. When you find good people like Julie and Phil, their sheer talent cancels out the risk of them yes-ing. I suppose the danger is not RTD And The Yes-Men, but a triumverate of people who are so similar that contrary opinions don’t get a look-in.”

Russell T Davies

In this article we are going to explore how Doctor Who fandom has become cult like, and how the combination of this and toxic identity politics has made the franchises fandom so poisonous that it threatens to destroy the series itself. Not only have the truly toxic fans had an influence on the show itself, but they have also made all Doctor Who forums, and even editing what are supposed to be factual articles on Doctor Who websites insular and dogmatic to the point where I can’t imagine many people having time for the franchise anymore.

What happens on Gallifrey Base when someone disagrees with a piece of received wisdom from the Fitzroy Crowd. Cheers Jon Blum.

All fandoms can be dogmatic. All fandoms have people who are self loathers, who are sticklers for tradition, who are abusive to other fans etc.

With Doctor Who however as Lawrence Miles has pointed out it goes beyond that. The Fitzroy Crowd (particularly Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat) are elevated to the position of royalty simply because they made Doctor Who popular again for a few years in the 00s.

We have already explored how the vile treatment Doctor Who received from the mainstream media in the 90s and 00s, bred a kind of desperation in fans to see the show accepted again above all else, even it was no longer the same show in any way shape or form, just as long as the brand of Doctor Who wasn’t targeted by shallow, moronic comedians on panel shows, then that was all that mattered.

Sadly Davies and Moffat used this to create a special kind of loyalty to the point where any criticism of them and their writing, no matter how measured and fair is viewed almost as heresy by certain quarters of fandom. “These were the men who delivered Doctor Who to glory. If you go against anything they say, you’re the type that would drag us back to the dark days of the 1990s.”

Now fair enough in response to this, both Moffat and Davies have received very dedicated haters, who yes have gone too far at certain points in their abuse of Davies and Moffat.

Still I feel that this wouldn’t happen if Doctor Who fandom were allowed to reflect a wider range of opinions.

Criticise anything about Davies and Moffat’s tenures on sites like Gallifrey Base and you will be either be dogpiled on, insulted, or eventually banned. It seems we must all learn to bend the knee.

The addition of identity politics meanwhile has just made the cult like mentality all the worse.

From about 2010-13 Steven Moffat was viciously slandered by radical feminists and regressive leftists.

Again I’m not by any measure right wing, but I do have problems with the more extreme examples of the left and their influence on fandom. They often paint themselves as simply wanting stronger roles for women and minorities, when in truth they often want to impose their own political agendas beyond that on works of fiction that should be for everyone.

They also often ironically want to divide people by race, gender and sexuality and define them entirely by those aspects of their personality.

A for lack of a better term SJW series, is not simply a series starring black people, or women, or LGBT people, which no one but a genuine bigot would have a problem with. It’s a series filled with explicit anti men material, that focuses more on making tired, cliched political points than in telling a good story. (No one is saying you can’t include politics in fiction, but the story itself still has to hold up on its own.)

It will also present its female, minority characters as tokens and trophies than as characters.

An example of this type of series is the CW’s Supergirl., which I think serves as quite a good contrast with series like Xena, Red Dwarf, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed none of which would be called SJW series, despite starring black, female, and LGBT leading characters.

Sadly as soon as the SJWs started to smear Moffat he caved. The reason they were able to get through to him, unlike Classic era fans was because the regressive leftists represent a young, hip, millenial audience to the Fitzroy Clique that they hope to win favour with. As they are all middle aged, it’s natural that they would want to make sure they don’t lose the young crowd. Of course there are plenty of middle aged SJWs and plenty of young classic era fans (including yours truly.)

Still Moffat and the rest of the Fitzroy Crowd held that mindset and so they went along with what the regressive left wanted for the series from the start of the Capaldi era onwards.

Here are examples of the SJWs vicious smear campaign against Moffat, as well as responses from Moffat and others to show it bothered them.

Problematic Posters For Doctor Who

Steven Moffat is a Classist

Has Doctor Who Become Sexist

Doctor Who Is Racist New Book Claims

Doctor Who Returns New Direction

BBC Responds To Sexist Accusations

Karen Gillan: Moffat Not Sexist

Steven Moffat Tweets Against Accusation of Sexism

Moffat’s “followers” as Paul Cornell would refer to them as, naturally followed suite when he started to embrace political correctness and unfortunately this just allowed them to bully dissenters to a greater extent than ever before.

Now they could smear you as a racist, a sexist, a homophobe over simply not liking the latest incarnation of the series, rather than simply a ming mong or not a true fan.

Here are a list of responses I received on Gallifrey Base to give you an example of the shows toxic fandom. The post in question that triggered these charming responses was simply asking posters how they’d fix Doctor Who. I mentioned decanonizing the revival, and not pandering to political correctness and the Gallifrey Base posters were not happy.

“It would seem burronjor finds the Thirteenth Doctor a sexually dominating figure and that makes him uncomfortable. I’d suggest his anxiety about that is more a matter for himself and a professional working in confidence, rather than for the BBC to make changes to accommodate. I mean they don’t even take strobe lighting off shows to accommodate people with photo-sensitive epilepsy – they just give a warning. Accommodating people who have fringe sexual hang ups they’re uncomfortable with, so they’re not triggered, isn’t very practical.”

“Whiny little bigot, when we see women or non-whites promoted to primary hero figures, that’s enough for manbabies like you to bitch and moan about how oppressed they are.”

I never once said I had a problem with women or non whites being promoted to primary hero figures. Would I have written articles like this if I did?

Xena Vs Buffy

Would I have been retweeted by leading actresses from genre tv series if I did?

Dana Delorenzo “Means More To Me”

(Just to be clear I don’t know Dana Delorenzo. She tweeted this because she liked my idea of her playing Amy Winehouse.)

I got that response from simply criticising the Jodie Whittaker era.

“I can only say, having been a fan since 1977 and an active member of this forum and its predecessor since 2003 you are, quite simply, the worst Doctor Who fan I’ve ever encountered.”

“I could point you to exactly the video in which Bowlestrek is Islamophobic but I don’t want to contribute to monetizing the **** any more.”

I don’t watch Bowlestrek’s videos anymore. I used to watch some of his videos, but he ended up becoming stuck too much in the angry guy mode. I also thought his recent tweets about Jodie being ugly were nasty and childish. That said he is not a white supremacist or a racist, and the constant smearing of him as a bigot has I think led to him being more aggressive in his videos and tweets. (He certainly wasn’t as aggressive in his earlier videos.)

“There are loons on both sides, yes. You’re one of them.”

“You sound awfully threatened by inclusive casting. I genuinely think this is where a lot of this anger towards Jodie’s casting comes from – loss of privilege feels awfully like discrimination don’t you think?”

Yes I certainly am threatened by inclusive casting and female led forms of entertainment. That’s why I write articles like this. Top 10 Best British Female Singers of the 21st Century

“Understand? Of course you do. Because you know all this, and you know the difference in society between then and now. You’re just trying to justify yourself because you don’t like diverse casting in a show you think should belong to you.”

“All I see is you ranting a load of alt-right rubbish. The show is exactly the same as it’s always been.

What’s changed is people like have been radicalised by extremists and trolls on line. You hide behind your racism and sexism by pretending writers have been bullied into creating rubbish characters.”

“It was about as mature, sophisticated and eloquent a response as the fetid maggot-strewn rubbish that you’ve been posting actually merits. Perhaps even more so, but I’m feeling generous.”

“But is that your Mam shouting to tell you that your tea’s ready? Best run along now, before your fish finger butties go cold.”

“I don’t think bynnojor is really interested in discussion ,or facts, or really anything than spewing his ignorant, vial hatred and dated alt-right nastiness all over the place. All the usual points, all the usual “pretending to be reasonable”, all the usual SJW, woke, buzz words. It’d be a parody but people like this do esist, and they are delude din the belief that they are some kind of majority. They just want to exist ina world of hatred where women and PoC are only featured if they keep in their places.”

Hilariously enough after this tirade of abuse I was banned for life for my supposed bad behaviour.

Gallifrey Base is far from the only site that will abuse and then ban you if you dare to question anything that the Fitzroy Crowd have said however.

On the website TV Tropes and Idioms I was banned simply for editing their article about the Doctor Who villain The Master.

TV Tropes article about the Master states that he and the Doctor had always had a romantic relationship with one another. (As do other articles on their site.)

I simply edited in the truth about the characters development in the Classic era. Originally the Master was going to be revealed to be the Doctors brother. Roger Delgado who played the Master himself thought up this idea and Jon Pertwee who played the Doctor liked it, as did Barry Letts the co-creator of the character.

They were going to reveal that the Master was the Doctors brother in Delgado’s final story, The Long Game, but tragically Delgado was killed in a car accident before this story could be made.

Barry Letts would later oversee producer John Nathan Turner’s first season as producer. He filled JNT in on the backstory of the character of the Master, including the idea that he was the Doctors brother.

JNT liked the idea and hinted at it throughout his era. He even came close to revealing it in Planet of Fire, but cut the scene at the last minute because he wanted to leave the mystery about both characters past open.

You can find an interview with Jon Pertwee on the Planet of the Spiders DVD where he talks about this, and says that as far as he is concerned the Master and the Doctor are brothers, and that’s the only way their relationship makes sense.

Barry Letts in the same docu confirms this. Peter Davison meanwhile on the Planet of Fire DVD confirms that JNT believed the Doctor and the Master to be brothers and almost revealed it in the Planet of Fire.

These are simple, easily verifiable facts and for writing them into the Master’s article on TV Tropes I was banned for life from the site.

The reason for that is because TV Tropes are very biased towards the Moffat era and the revival overall. Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies, “ship” the Doctor and the Master.

Quite why you would want to ship the Doctor with a genocidal, sadistic, mass murdering monster who was envisioned as being the Doctors BROTHER, I have no idea, but again because Davies and Moffat say it (and wrote it into their versions of the character) a lot of their “followers” bent the knee and not only say that is how their relationship is now, but insist that it was always the case to make sure Davies and Moffat’s versions don’t stand out.

Steven Moffat in particular always insisted that his version of the Master, Missy channeled Roger Delgado, the original Master. This was undoubtedly because Missy was the first female Master, so in order for her to be a success, Moffat not only claimed she was in line with the others, but actually MORE faithful to the original than the other male Masters were.

It was a bold move, but it doesn’t hold up to anyone who has seen even 2 seconds of Delgado’s Master.

Delgado Master

MASTER: How well you know me, Doctor! Now come on, smarten yourselves up. We want to look our best for a royal audience, you know.
JO: He’s very confident.
MASTER: Well, Miss Grant, as an Earth poet once said, ‘My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure’. Come on, you fellows, let me out! Your Emperor is waiting to see me.

Missy

MISSY: Well, yes, of course it is. I mean, how would you ever find your glasses? Or the little girl’s room? And what if you kissed an ugly?

I think a lot of SJWs also adopted the Master and the Doctor together as gay icons, which is silly as their relationship isn’t exactly a positive representation of gay relationships.

Naturally writing in the actual FACT that the Master and Doctor were meant to be brothers completely destroys the entire Master/Doctor shipping crap, and shows just how unfaithful Moffat and Davies’ versions the character were. Even if you like Missy, if you are being truthful you have to write that she was a huge deviation which Davies and Moffat’s followers aren’t prepared to do, so I had to be banned.

Here is the conversation I had with a mod named Fighteer who both insulted and banned me.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=5cma6iojg5o27puhulc24sje&page=834

After this I was still able to log on, via an old account. I then tried to edit another article on their site about pandering to the base and included Steven Moffat’s attempts to pander to the extreme feminist side of his audience (which I backed up with facts.) Once again I was banned.

I foolishly tried to sort out my differences there with a new account in a discussion page, and backed up everything I had said about Moffat’s pandering with verifiable sources, only to be insulted and banned yet again. Not only that I also brought up the issue on the discussion page of the article in a civil and reasonable way (again with sources,) only to have what I wrote deleted after I was banned, in an effort to make sure no one could read my points.

Here is my latest confrontation with the people who desperately want the Doctor to sleep with his evil, xenophobic, twisted brother.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/query.php?parent_id=90524&type=att#comment-90524

You can see how none of them are able to answer my question?

Instead it’s just all insults, calling me a crushing bore, telling me I lack the moral high ground, because I ban evaded and “I WANT TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER”. In regards to the ban evasion I was upfront about it. What else was I to do? I was banned unfairly for stating an objective FACT, just because it flew in the face of a mods infantile shipping agenda.

Fighteer demonstrated remarkable maturity by stating this after banning me again.

Well, that’s fun. Bye, ban evader. By the way, I feed on your hatred. It makes me more powerful.

Ironically this sounds like something the Master from the classic era, who was depicted as a controlling megalomaniac would say.

DOCTOR: The Master’s consumed with hatred. It’s his one great weakness.
MASTER: Ha. Weakness, Doctor? Hate is strength.

This is where posting FACTS will get you on a DW site. It wasn’t even as though in regards to the Master I posted anything controversial. It was literally just a description of what Barry Letts and Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado all wanted the character to be, yet because it didn’t fit in with Moffat’s kinky Mary Poppins version, that was enough for me to be insulted, smeared as a misogynist, a bore, a trouble maker and get banned three times!

Sadly the same would undoubtedly be true on other sites. If you were to edit the wikipedia article on the Master to include the knowledge that the Master was supposed to be the Doctors brother and mention how the character has changed over the years, (the way that other articles do about villains like the Joker.) A Moffat fan or a rabid SJW would most likely remove your edits without any kind of proper discussion and ban you as a trouble maker, a homophobe and a sexist.

A part of me wonders if future releases of Planet of the Spiders or Planet of Fire will even include the interviews with Letts and Pertwee and Davison, talking about the Masters origins? If they do, then people will know how unfaithful Missy is. (They’d know that just by watching the original Masters, but still you can’t even argue that the romance was a subtext with this in mind.)

I can easily imagine these extras and interviews being left on the cutting room floor, and all official articles on tv tropes, wikipedia being edited and monitored to make sure Moffat’s and Davies’ versions aren’t as ridiculously out of place as they seem. (Even though they still are.)

Similarly on the Planet Skaro Forum I was banned for stating the facts about the smear campaign about Steven Moffat. Ironically I had only come to the forum in the first place because someone insulted me after I had posted a link to a particular thread a few times (as examples of Moffat’s disdain for the original series.)

A poster accused me of being “the worlds angriest Scot” (as though my Scottish heritage has anything to do with my arguments?) When I explained myself, and again posted links to my arguments, the mods blocked me and sent me a private message calling me a stupid prick.

Here is the thread.

Planet Skaro Forum

One of the worst individual examples of toxic fandom meanwhile has to be Elizabeth Sandifier, a popular blogger.

Sandifier has always been a somewhat irrational, bullying figure. (She has a page on LOL Cows for a reason.)

I personally had a clash with her when she obsessively went through a number of my posts on The Hive and started stalking me on twitter. (She accused me of being alt right, a sexist and encouraged people to mock my original fiction.)

When I confronted her on her accusations, and asked her to name me ONE thing I had said that was sexist or alt right, she called me a sexist cockwomble and blocked me.

Two years later, after the debacle of the Timeless Children which Sandifier hated (it seems that was too far even for the cult like New Who fans.) I decided to offer an olive branch and left a comment on her blog saying that we needed to ditch the Doctor Who is all about change narrative.

She responded by telling me to get the fuck off of her blog. When I told her that was a childish response and she should grow up, she posted a song telling me to kill myself.

Here is the song she posted.

https://idieyoudie.bandcamp.com/track/join-mussolini

I suffer from severe chronic depression as anyone who follows this blog (or looked obsessively at my posts on the Hive as she did) would know. I have been open about my struggle with it for years. Almost every single year this blog has been delayed at some point due to my frequent bouts of severe depression.

Yet Sandifier would send me a song saying “KILL YOURSELF, KILL YOURSELF, KILL YOURSELF DON’T DELAY.” When I pointed out to Sandifier my struggle with mental health problems and how inappropriate it was, she responded by deleting my comment talking about my struggles with mental health, but leaving the comment telling me to kill myself.

Essentially she wanted to taunt me about killing myself, but not get into trouble for it with her woke friends, so she deleted the comment that showed she was taunting someone with mental health problems, rather than the comment taunting someone with mental health problems. I think that tells you all you need to know about Sandifier.

The toxicity of fandom extends even to those who run Doctor Who Magazine and official events.

I recently got into a spat with Benjamin Cook who blocked me. Now in all fairness I am not going to play the victim here. I told Cook to fuck off. Recently Doctor Who Magazine recently hired Claudia Boleyn and many other controversial figures in fandom and openly said that if this upset regular fans, all the better. Claudia Boleyn is a youtuber, singer/songwriter who has been quite vocal about what she feels is the misogyny of the Moffat era. I like Claudia as a person to be fair. She is a very nice, intelligent woman, but I disagree with her political points and by her own admission she was part of the SJW wave of fans. Hiring her, whilst being so vocally against the likes of Bowlestrek and Nerdrotic as what fandom shouldn’t be is making a definite statement.

The magazine however later had to censor and dismiss Claudia Boleyn when she wanted to write an article focusing on the misogyny in the Moffat era. (Showing that even the SJWs have to know their place and bend the knee.)

Naturally when Ben Cook wanted the older fans back, I told him he could fuck off after insulting us, and his response was to send this to me.

Oh mate. DWM is a magazine about Doctor Who, made by people who love Doctor Who, for people who love Doctor Who. And that’s not you. You’re just an angry, women-hating, transphobic turd. If you were the last man alive, DWM wouldn’t want YOU as a reader.

Ha nice try: Now fuck off outta my mentions. I’ve read your tweets. Alt right? You’re not even one of the interesting ones. You’re just… boring.

And half YOUR mentions are people telling you to fuck off. So let me add to the chorus…

Fuck off, you sexist cockwomble.

Now again I didn’t expect a civil response, but I do find it quite funny the way that Cook felt he needed to put me in my place. Who am I? I should be a nobody to Cook, but clearly just as Laurence Miles pointed out in the 00s, the clique are so desperate not to be rumbled, any criticism, even from the plebs and ming mongs they would have looked down on, must be silenced. Also his arguments consists of the usual smearing me as a woman hater, a transphobe, a racist etc, without any proof or even reason to think that I am any of those things.

EDIT update, I later had a much more civil interaction with Claudia Boleyn which really moved me and just further reminded me not to tar all or even most new who, RTD era, SJW fans with the same brush. Whilst there is a problem with toxic fandom, it only represents a minority who sadly have all the power.

Recently when Claudia was suffering from depression. (Something I can obviously relate too.)  I sent Claudia a message of support, and she was grateful and sent this lovely message back to me.

Thank you so much for your comment, Burrunjor. It honestly made me smile. Thank you for your kindness and for your compliments. I hope you know that though our views may differ, I really do respect you, and that it means more than I can say that in spite of that you’ve taken the time to wish me well. You mention your own feelings of regret, and I hope you find some peace with those soon. I also hope it’s not wrong of me to feel comforted by you sharing your struggle with a similar issue last year. I think just knowing that you’re here now, and you got through it, has given me a lot of strength.

(Also, I’m a Sasha Dhawan girl now!)

All the best and I wish I could do more to thank you. Xxx

I think this is very important to remember when discussing the toxic side of fandom, as it shows that people with different views can get along very well, which just further highlights how irrational people like Elizabeth Sandifier and those on Gallifrey Base are.

At no point in all the times I’ve been banned, told to kill myself, told to get the fuck out of Doctor Who fandom, smeared as a racist, a Nazi, a homophobe, had people gloat about kicking me off of websites, delete what I’ve written, been subject to racist abuse “KILL YOURSELF WHITE BOY TODAY” “World’s angriest Scot,” has anyone come up with a counter argument to my points about Steven Moffat, Missy and Delgado, or feminist pandering in the revival.

By far and away the most disturbing example of how far some cult like Doctor Who fans are willing to go however, is the recent smearing of Bowlestrek on social media as an animal abuser.

Again I acknowledge a lot of Bowlestrek’s content has become derivative and nasty, (far more so than Claudia Boleyn’s content ever was against Moffat for instance. She always insisted that it wasn’t personal, whilst Bowlestrek recently made nasty comments about Jodie looking like a pig.) That still doesn’t excuse the lengths people on Gallifrey Base and other sites have gone to discredit him however.

Recently a group of Doctor Who fans on twitter created a false rumour that Bowlestrek raped a dog. This was then picked up by users on Gallifrey Base and repeated as a fact on their site and across all of social media. Doctor Who fans even started sending Bowlestrek pictures of dogs, and messages saying “woof.”

These accusations could seriously threaten Bowlestrek’s everyday life, make him unemployable, make him a target of vigilantes. The rumour was completely fabricated, but the posters on twitter and Gallifrey Base hoped the mud would stick. I spoke with several fans who were spreading the rumour, telling them that it was slander. Their response was simply to say that Bowlestrek deserved it because he referred to Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Nasty.

See here

Mr Tardis Reviews “Bowlestrek Dog Rumours”

Here one fan named Dimmeh Looming openly admits she knows it isn’t true, yet continues to spread it around because she finds it hilarious (she also continues to tweet Woof at Bowlestrek.)

Dimmeh Looming on Twitter

This was a serious wake up call for me not to get involved with organised fandom anymore. Whilst it’s lame, cowardly, and pathetic to ban people for not accepting your infantile revisionist views of Roger Delgado and Jon Pertwee, or to call people misogynists for not liking Jodie’s “performance”. Trying to smear someone as a sex offender for making shouty youtube videos is frightening and a sign of just how dangerous an organised fandom for something as benign as Doctor Who can become.

Bowlestrek shags dogs

Stop Raping Your Dog

You Got Offended When That Dog Article

One Hand on His Dick Thinking About Dogs

The very idea that these people would try and ruin a man’s life like this over a disagreement over a crappy tv show defies belief.

What’s hilarious about the rise of toxic fandom is how they often try and smear their critics of being guilty of what they are actually guilty of. (A common tactic among all bullies.)

A prominent example of this can be seen in Mr Tardis Reviews recent outburst at the NotMyDoctor crowd. Now I have covered Mr Tardis in previous articles. He is a youtube commentator who shills for the BBC (he has admitted working for them in a freelance capacity in the past, and is clearly desperately trying to get a job with them.)

He is also a rampant egotist who sees himself as a knight for women, minorities, and LGBT people in the genre. He happily throws other Doctor Who and sci fi fans under the bus and smears them as sexists, white supremacists etc, just to make himself look better.

The great irony is that he barely knows anything about female or minority characters. Not once on his channel has he ever reviewed an iconic female led genre series, like Xena, Buffy, Charmed, Once Upon A Time, Ghost Whisperer, Sleepy Hollow, I Zombie etc. He doesn’t follow any major actresses from the genre on social media, like Lucy Lawless, Lana Parilla, Maggie Q or Dana Delorenzo (he probably wouldn’t know who half these women were.)

When I called him out on this he ran through a list of female led films he had reviewed. The only problem was they were all films he had to review either as a professional critic or to stay relevant. None of them were films he had tracked down on his own, and even then the list was poor as he was forced to include 50 Shades of Grey among them.

Mr Tardis doesn’t care about female heroes at all. It’s just a way for him to stroke his ego and get in with the BBC, but in spite of this he tries to present himself as an impartial figure in Doctor Who fandom.

In the last few months as the Jodie era’s viewers have crashed, Mr Tardis has naturally taken to blaming the toxic white male fans, but ironically all of the things he accuses the NotMyDoctor crowd of, he and those he associates with are far more guilty of.

See for yourself.

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First off I’d just like to say how ironic it is that Mr Tardis is blaming Doctor Who fans for the shows fall in viewers. Don’t you remember when Jodie’s first episode aired to massive viewers, he was gloating about “get woke, get high viewing figures?”

See here.

Yet now it’s all our fault? Hilariously enough Dave Cullen said this exact thing would happen before Jodie’s first series aired that when it declined in viewers, it would be the sexist white males who would get the blame. (I am not the biggest fan of Dave Cullen. I am a socialist, and I support gay marriage, so I clash with him on most major issues. Still credit where credit is due, unlike Mr Tardis he called it out exactly as it was.)

1591605713401.png

The very idea that Bowlestrek is a white supremacist is laughable. Notice that Mr Tardis never backs his claims up. I do. In this article I include tweets of people accusing Bowlestrek of raping a dog (and admitting that it’s a lie.) I have links to arguments on TV Tropes and Planet Skaro, direct quotes from Gallifrey Base.

Mr Tardis on the other hand can’t find one quote from Bowlestrek that backs up the claim that he is a Nazi.

As for accusing others of spreading fake news, this is a man who saw nothing wrong with people spreading rumours that Bowlestrek was a sex offender, who claimed Jeremy Clarkson was a holocaust denier and who had to retract a completely false statement he made about Sargon of Akkad and apologise for it.

See here.

Again I back up what I say Trilbee. By the way I despise Sargon of Akkad too. I used to like some of his videos I admit, but I now consider him a right wing shill and apologist for Pinochet. Still unlike Trilbee I’ve never had to retract anything negative I’ve written about him, because I actually do my research when criticising him and don’t just jump on a “Sargon bad man” band wagon.

Furthermore Mr Tardis’ videos and articles are often very poorly researched. In his review of Amy, the 2015 Amy Winehouse biography (which is one of the few good female led films he has reviewed, but even then that was only because it was out in the cinema.) Mr Tardis regularly refers to Amy Winehouse’s boyfriend that got her addicted to drugs and inspired Back to Black as Reg Travis.

As anyone who paid even the slightest attention to Amy’s life will know, it was her earlier boyfriend, Blake Fielder Civil that got her hooked on drugs and inspired Back to Black. She only knew Reg Travis for the last two years of her life, and he tried desperately to get her off alcohol.

If he only referred to him as Reg Travis once, it could have just been an honest mistake, but he does so at least 3 times throughout the article.

See here.

TrilbeeReviews.com Amy

And all of this is exacerbated by her relationship with her boyfriend Reg Traviss which was incredibly damaging due to his negative influence.

She wrote “Back To Black” when her relationship to Reg Traviss originally broke down and it was one of the most difficult periods of her life. She eventually got back with Reg and overcame many of her struggles.

You uh, you sure about that?

Reg Traviss talks about Amy

With this in mind I wonder if he has actually even watched the film, as there is no way anyone could possibly think Reg Travis was the person who got Amy hooked on drugs otherwise.

(He also clearly never paid any attention to Amy back in the 00s when she was around either. Again so much for appreciating prominent female entertainers. I meanwhile was a fan of Amy’s since 2003, just sayin.)

Nerdrotic meanwhile at least was proven right about the Ruth Doctor rumor.

Nerdrotic claims Doctors original gender to be revealed in Season 12

Never mind Nerdrotic’s fake news (that’s actually real) I’d be worried about getting sued by Jeremy Clarkson and Bowlestrek and Reg Travis if they ever see what you wrote about them Shilbee.

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It’s hilarious that Mr Tardis would complain about gatekeeping. This from a man who once said “GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS FANDOM.”

Second I wonder if this bigotry includes “KILL YOURSELF WHITE BOY TODAY.” Or “World’s angriest Scot?” I wonder if this vile behaviour includes smearing people as sex offenders, or telling people who’ve suffered a severe, chronic, life long battle with depression to kill themselves?

Also I think it’s funny how the NotMyDoctor crowd are being accused of being bad fans because they dislike the current version, whilst Mr Tardis never held this attitude towards the feminists and SJWs who smeared Moffat as a sexist during the 2010s?

They devoted an entire website to trashing Moffat called STFU Moffat.com

STFU Moffat.com

Yet where was Mr Tardis, who was around at that time’s outrage and declaration that these people deserve unhappiness and that he was glad they were miserable?

Furthermore for all his talk of the NotMyDoctor crowd bullying actors and people involved in the show, Mr Tardis doesn’t seem to care when people are actually fired and even blacklisted from the franchise for expressing the wrong opinion to the other side.

Now tell me Mr Tardis who was it that got two people involved in the franchise (ironically two gay men) fired recently?

That would be the SJW “fans” who got both Gareth Roberts a longtime writer for the series, and James Dreyfus, who plays the first incarnation of the Master in the Big Finish audios, fired and blacklisted for criticising identity politics online.

James Dreyfus on Twitter:

James Dreyfus on Twitter:

“Your tears say more than substantial evidence ever could.”

James Dreyfus on Twitter:

James Dreyfus on Twitter:

James Dreyfus on Twitter:

Another Week in the Relentless War on Women 20th - 26th July.

Following these attacks, Dreyfus was dismissed by Big Finish from his role as the Master.

Meanwhile Gareth Roberts was also not just fired, but blacklisted from the entire franchise too. Just to be clear I don’t agree with Roberts, in that I think that trans people do exist. I do believe that gender dysphoria is real, and I have no issue whatsoever with calling a trans woman, a woman. Still to essentially ruin the man’s life by making him never able to work again, especially in a franchise that he helped keep alive during the wilderness period is really low.

Gareth Roberts Axed From Doctor Who

Hey it’s not like the warm, inclusive side of fandom that Mr Tardis associates with actually chased a former Doctor off of Twitter is it?

Oh that’s right they did, just days after Jodie was announced.

Peter Davison Chased off Twitter

Meanwhile Colin Baker who was for a female Doctor, and who wrote a condescending article insulting those who were opposed to it, wasn’t chased off of twitter at all.

And to think Mr Tardis complains because someone he claims to know who worked on series 12 (he conveniently doesn’t say who, or show any evidence) received mean tweets from some NotMyDoctor people. Try having your entire career torpedoed because you disagreed with the other side, or being chased off social media by fans of a franchise you starred in, or told to off yourself when you’re struggling with mental health issues?

Ultimately none of this matters to Mr Tardis or any of the true toxic side of fandom. They literally don’t see Jodie’s critics as people, so it’s okay to smear them in the worst possible ways, taunt them for their mental health problems and ruin their careers.

All of the things Mr Tardis has said are true about the side of fandom he has chosen to ally himself with. They are the ones who will be putting people off. Can you imagine any normal person wanting to be part of Doctor Who fandom today? Why would they want to be part of a forum where if they disagree with received wisdom they’d be labelled a ming mong, a sexist, an animal abuser, and told to go kill themselves?

And by wrong opinion I mean stating an objective fact about the shows long history, like writing that the Roger Delgado intended the Master to be the Doctors brother.

Then there is the fact that actors and writers are in danger of having their entire careers sunk, and their reputations slandered by this warm, inclusive fandom. Honestly what producer, writer or actor would want to work on Doctor Who (an already dying franchise) and run the risk of pissing off such a volatile and bullying fandom (who the BBC and Big Finish will always cater to?)

The only type of person interested in joining that type of fandom is someone who already has the same cult like mentality.

Gallifrey Base gets a new patron (It needs all the support it can get these days not surprisingly since most of its old guard have been either chased off or banned.) Cheers Jon Blum.

Even worse than the toxic fans however are the cowardly fans in the middle. They are arguably the people who have let it get so bad.

There are many fans who understandably want no part in the culture war that Doctor Who fandom has become, which is fair enough. I have no ill will towards fans who wisely just left the shit show the fandom is now like the youtuber, Wingy Media. He is the smart one.

However the people I get annoyed at are the likes of Who Addicts Reviews and Channel Pup, both of whom complain about toxic fandom, but only ever go after people like Bowlestrek.

It’s cowardice plain and simple. I hate saying that as I have had a few interactions with Channel Pup and we got along fine. I don’t think he is a bad person, (not like Sandifier) but the way he only goes after Bowlestrek so vehemently to me always seemed like he was going after an easy target.

I could be wrong, and if he wants to challenge what I’ve written here, I’d be more than happy to hear him out.

Still look at this video.

As you can see he rips into Bowlestrek in the nastiest and most childish ways. Some of his points are valid like Bowlestrek’s nasty comments about an actress from the new Terminator film, but he ends up burying them under petty insults, like ironically telling Bowlestrek he looks like a cinema masterbator.

I have never resorted to personal insults when taking apart Mr Tardis’ or Claudia Boleyn’s arguments. In fact I have always stressed that I quite liked Claudia as a person, it was just her opinions and impact on the franchise that I disagree with.

I may have called Mr Tardis an egotist, and a hypocrite based on what he actually said, but imagine if I said “Mr Tardis looks like the type of person that would feel up girls in parks.” How moronic and just plain nasty would that look? Yet that is actually what Channel Pup did in his attempt to debunk the supposedly toxic side of fandom.

Added to that the video is extremely poorly researched as Bowlestrek later took it apart.

Still that’s not even the main issue. The point is, where was a video like this about the STFU Moffat crowd? They constantly targeted Steven Moffat, they smeared him as a sexist, they got upset over nothing, they made ridiculous accusations that Matt Smith’s Doctor encouraged sexual assault.

Yet it’s Bowlestrek that Channel Pup attacks so strongly? I’ll be honest here, Bowlestrek is irrelevant. He’s just a shouty guy on youtube. He hasn’t influenced the direction of the series by smearing it’s head writer the way the STFU Moffat crowd did, he hasn’t got anyone fired, he hasn’t made forums into places where if you express the wrong opinion, you’ll either be banned, insulted, smeared or all of the above. Even his lowest, most abusive posts have never reached the level of slandering someone as a sexual abuser, or telling them to commit suicide and mocking their mental health struggles.

The simple reason Channel Pup and others go after Bowlestrek is because Bowlestrek is irrelevant and an easy target. You can smear him and face no consequences at all. Try and take on the people who smeared Bowlestrek as a dog rapist and maybe they’ll dream up some nasty little rumour about you. Similarly maybe they’ll get you booted off of social media like Peter Davison, or ruin your chances to work in the industry like James Dreyfus. (If established actors like Dreyfus and Davison can’t cope with the vicious backlash these people are capable of dredging up, what the hell chance does a young and upcoming youtuber have?)

I very much doubt that the likes of Channel Pup would even be willing to go through what I did on Gallifrey Base and have dozens of people dogpile on him, insult him as a misogynist, a racist, a homophobe, and be banned and have them mock him when he couldn’t respond. (I wouldn’t have gone through that if I’d known how bad Gallifrey Base was at first.)

That’s fine if he doesn’t want to go through that, but to try and pin all the blame on the decline of Doctor Who’s fandom on someone like Bowlestrek just because he is an easy target is not only cowardly, but actually helps the creepy, cult like “family” of Doctor fandom. It just further cements their delusion that they are the gatekeepers of Doctor Who fandom who have tried to keep the toxic elements (contrary opinions, people who don’t “bend the knee”) out, but now they are losing.

Who Addicts Reviews meanwhile are even worse as they were actually part of the STFU Moffat bandwagon, yet they now act all high and mighty against the NotMyDoctor Crowd? The same applies to others like Five Who Fans who similarly claim that the likes of Bowlestrek have brought Doctor Who fandom down, whilst also claiming to be impartial. They never say how Bowlestrek did this however, cite examples of forums he’s ruined, actors he’s got fired, examples of the show pandering to him that have ruined it?

In the end if you just want out of Doctor Who fandom like Wingy Media, I could not be more sympathetic, but don’t try and feed the very toxicity that is destroying it by dogpiling on an easy target like Five Who Fans of Who Addicts.

(Edit update, I just saw that Channel Pup and Bowlestrek have buried the hatchet. I respect Channel Pup for being willing to patch things up with someone he was in a feud with, which is exceedingly rare on the internet. Nevertheless I still think that the NotMyDoctor crowd have become all too easy a target for supposedly impartial fans to blame the decline of the show on. I don’t like the NotMyDoctor crowd to be clear. I think they have been guilty of overreacting to the smallest things like the STFU Moffat crowd, such as when they did multiple videos devoted to Jodie wearing a silly costume on set. Still ultimately so far they haven’t had anywhere near the impact the other side have had.)

As you can see Doctor Who fandom is really not even a fandom anymore. It is a cult. A cult that will try and silence any dissenting opinions, and worse ruin the reputations of people it sees as a threat.

Of course not all Doctor Who fans are like this. 90 percent of interactions I’ve had, even with just New Who, Davies, Moffat era fans have been pleasant, it’s just the tiny ten percent that hold all the power that have turned the fandom into a cult.

I’m not saying that we should shun all of New Who. I’m not even saying shun the Jodie Whittaker era, but we need to stop throwing accusations of sexism around at the drop of a hat, stop elevating people like Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat to being above criticism.

No figure in any fandom should ever hold the position that Paul Cornell at least wanted to have. “Reigning or serving.” In contrast to Doctor Who, the Buffy/Angel fandom is one of the best I have ever had the good fortune to be a part of.

Log on the Buffy boards, and then log on Gallifrey Base and the difference is quite alarming. On the Buffy boards you can criticise beloved stories like Spike and Buffy, and not have people dogpile on you. There are some minor fandom in wars like Spuffy vs Bangel, but it’s nothing like what you see on Gallifrey Base.

I lasted a short while on Gallifrey Base as a poster and my entire time there was a truly horrible experience. In contrast I’ve been on the Buffy board for a couple of months now and I’ve loved it. It’s not as though some of my Buffy opinions aren’t controversial. I despise the ever popular Spike/Buffy romance for instance. Yet there is no dogmatic, cult like belief on that site. Even Joss Whedon, the actual creator of the Buffy/Angel series is not held up in the same regard as Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat.

After the Fitzroy crowd are dethroned so to speak, no one else should ever take their place as cult like figures to Doctor Who fandom. That to me is the root cause of the toxicity in the fandom. The identity politics has not helped and needs eliminated as a dominant force too, but ultimately all fandoms are suffering from this right now, but none are as badly hit as Doctor Who.

The combination of its existing cult like loyalty to Moffat and Davies, and the cult of SJWs are truly toxic and needs eliminated from Doctor Who pronto if it is to survive.

What the Family do to Nevile’s flat here is a pretty good representation of what the Fitzroy Crowd and their “followers” have done to Doctor Who and it’s past.

What Ruined Doctor Who: Part 4: Stagnation

🐣 25+ Best Memes About Gallifrey Falls No More | Gallifrey Falls ...

You would have thought that the older Tom Baker would have remembered this, unless Gallifrey is going to come back again! I wouldn’t put it past the Fitzroy Clique to reuse that story arc. 

In the previous articles we’ve looked at how the mantras of “all change is good” ,”William Hartnell morphed into Patrick Troughton and that was a change, so this is the same,” “Doctor Who is all about change” destroyed the core identity of Doctor Who as it meant that the Doctor could be anyone, and anything (a recent retcon of the series by Russell T Davies revealed that the Doctor can even regenerate into animals.)

In this article we will be exploring, somewhat paradoxically how the revival has also suffered from becoming too repetitive and how this is linked to its lack of respect for the shows past.

Ironically for a show that tries to justify its ever increasingly disastrous creative decisions with “it’s all about change”, the 21st century version of Doctor Who has become one of the most formulaic and predictable genre series in almost every respect.

It’s companions, story arcs, villains, even its Doctors to some extent are all just slight variants and rehashes of the same characters, themes and stories again and again.

The reason for this is because the writers ironically don’t practice what they preach and are scared to break out of what they think is a winning formula. (It was back in the 00s, but we are now almost 20 years on. That would be like if 80s Who was still being filmed in black and white.)

Added to that their obsession with rewriting Doctor Who’s past with things like the Hybrid Prophecy, the Timeless Children, gender bending regeneration and the Master being in love with the Doctor etc, has become their only way of keeping the show “fresh” and original. Ultimately however the majority of the shows stories are still just the same old drek we’ve seen dozens of times before, except now the Doctor is a girl, or the Master is a girl so that means it must be really fresh and exciting right?

Ultimately the way you keep a show fresh and exciting is by having the character go on new adventures, new types of stories and have them encounter new types of characters and villains.

That was how Classic Who reinvented itself. It changed the types of stories the Doctor went on, from historicals to base under siege, to spy and espionage thrillers, to gothic horror, yet underneath it all, it always kept the Doctor the same character fundamentally.

The same is true for any long running series. Look at Angel, the spin off from Buffy (which I just recently finished rewatching.) It went from a supernatural crime noir series, to a Prisoner style series about Wolfram and Hart trying to break Angel, to a supernatural soap opera, to a series about its lead running an evil law firm.

Throughout it however the character of Angel, though going through natural developments, still always remained Angel, a heroic Vampire with a soul.

The makers of New Who however it seems have it the wrong way round. They think that the core character, who serves as something for the long time viewers to latch onto, should be changed to the point where they are completely unrecognizable, whilst the stories can just keep being the same, boring old ideas from 2007 without any kind of variation.  (That would be like in Angel had remained a crime noir series for 5 seasons, but the character of Angel had one season been retconned into being a Werewolf, the next an actual Angel, the next a God, etc.)

Added to that if you keep obsessing about rewriting the characters past, then it means that you will end up constantly keep retelling the same stories. For instance season 9 and 12 of the revival both give us different accounts of the Doctors origins. The classic era meanwhile, most of the time would fill a gap in, like why the Doctor ran away in The War Games, and then leave it at that. The writers would decide to go on and tell new stories, or fill in other gaps about the Doctors life and as a result didn’t spend two whole years on the same question. Fair enough Genesis presents us with a different account of the Daleks origins, but as we have been over, the first Dalek story didn’t really show us the Daleks origins, just gave us a vague second hand account. Furthermore after Genesis no one bothered to explore the Daleks origins again, because what would be the point? We had seen that story now, move on to something else.

Sadly however the Fitzroy Clique have become too focused on the wrong thing, and as a result New Who even without the politics, the fan rage against the destruction of the Doctors character, is just simply a tired and boring show for most viewers in the following ways.

1/ Enemies

Doctor Who' Brit Binge: 10 Greatest Dalek Episodes | Anglophenia ...

“Remember a time when the return of the Daleks was a big deal as they hadn’t been around for a few years?”

The overwhelming majority of New Who seasons have featured either the Daleks, the Cybermen or the Master, or some combination of them as the main villains.

Season 1: The Daleks

Season 2: The Daleks and the Cybermen.

Season 3: The Master

Season 4: The Daleks and Davros

Specials: The Master and Rassilon

Series 5: The Alliance, the two main members of which are the Daleks and the Cybermen.

Series 6: Finally a new villain.

Series 7: The Great Intelligence

Series 8: The Master and the Cybermen

Series 9: There is no main villain per se, but the story arc still revolves around the Daleks and the Master and the Time Lords.

Series 10: The Master and the Cybermen

Series 11: Tzim Sha

Series 12: The Master and the Cybermen.

Out of 12 series, just two feature a new villain, whilst only three don’t feature the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Master or some combination of those three villains. In fact out of the last 5 season finales, only two haven’t featured the Master and the Cybermen teaming up.

Furthermore the monsters themselves I find have often become somewhat formulaic in terms of their role in the series. Before the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Master all represented very different threats to the Doctor.

The Daleks were an evil he could never stamp out. They were an empire who covered the galaxy. Even if the Doctor saved one planet from them, a hundred more would still be under their control at any given time. “We have been delayed not defeated, the Daleks are never defeated.”

The Cybermen were in contrast a desperate, dying race, struggling to survive. They had reached the point of extinction as an organic race, and had prolonged their lives as machine creatures. Now however they were reaching extinction again and seemingly couldn’t prolong their lives any longer. In a way they were more sympathetic as they just wanted to survive. Also in contrast to the Daleks, they didn’t view those they conquered as being inferior creatures. On the contrary they converted them in the hopes of learning from other life forms.

The Day of the Daleks

CONTROLLER: If only you would let me recruit more human security guards, I
DALEK: Humans are treacherous and unreliable!
CONTROLLER: Not all humans. I have served you faithfully.
DALEK: Do not dispute with the Daleks! Obey without question! 
CONTROLLER: Very well.

The Tomb of the Cybermen 

CONTROLLER: We have decided how you will be used.
KLIEG: Yes?
CONTROLLER: You are a logician. Our race is also logical. You will be the leader of the new race.
KLIEG: You will listen to my proposals then?
CONTROLLER: Yes, we will listen, but first you will be altered.

See the difference between them?

Both monsters were also used differently in terms of how they were scary. The Daleks lacked a physical presence as they were small, pepper pot shaped, vulnerable, and therefore they would always be scary in large numbers. They would also often be put in a powerful position, or given lackeys who obeyed them like the Ogrons, or if they were few in number, we’d get a chance to see how they manipulate people around them.

The Cybermen meanwhile up close had a tremendous physical presence. If one of the monsters cornered you it was terrifying, as there was no way you could even defend yourself against it. As a result the Cybermen were often used in tight, claustrophobic settings in Classic Who such as in the sewers in The Invasion and the icey tombs of Telos where they could be lurking around any corner and there was no escape.

The Master meanwhile was a different type of enemy in that he had a more personal grudge against the Doctor, was more manipulative and sought to bring about his own universal order.

Now in all fairness to Russell T Davies I think he did do a lot new and interesting things with the Daleks. Even Steven Moffat I feel was able to find a new take on the monsters in some of his stories too. (Ironically I think a lot of the new series writers did a better job with the Daleks and some other villains than the Doctor himself.)

Still the villains overuse and the fact that they constantly have to keep being used in the big, grand finales have gradually caused them all to slowly become the same bland, generic supervillains to the point where by the end of the Chibnall era, there’s hardly any difference between the three of them.

All three have at various points in the revival been turned into villains who are the last of their kind, and are desperately trying to rebuild their fallen empire. (The Daleks in Parting of the Ways, the Master in Last of The Time Lords, The Cybermen in Nightmare in Silver.)

All three have been responsible for the destruction of Gallifrey and the Time Lords at different points. (The Daleks in the 9th Doctors era, the Cybermen and the Master in Chibnalls era.)

The Cybermen’s desire to turn people into members of their own kind was eschewed completely in their latest appearance, where the monsters simply wanted to destroy all life in the universe, much like the Daleks. The Master meanwhile similarly wanted to destroy all life in the universe too. (Which is extremely out of character as the villain is normally a total coward who would never risk his own life.)

At the same time the Daleks have also become too earth centric like the Cybermen too. In the classic era, the Cybermen were interested in the earth more because it was their twin planet. The Daleks meanwhile though invading earth in two stories (The Dalek Invasion of Earth and Day of the Daleks) were often shown to be warring with other species throughout Classic Who.

Their first story sees the monsters battling with the Thals, The Chase features their conflict with the Mechanoids, Daleks Master Plan features their dodgy alliance with other alien races to conquer the Galaxy, Planet of and Death to feature the Daleks fighting with and enslaving other alien races (the Spirodons and the Exxilons) whilst Destiny revolves around their war with The Movellans.

All of this helped the Daleks to feel like a wider threat than the Cybermen, as humanity were just one of many races they had enslaved and warred with. In the revival however, other than the Time War, that is only fleetingly glimpsed, (and a tiny blink and you’ll miss it cameo of the Movellans.) We haven’t seen any other alien species the Daleks have either enslaved, are allied with or are at war with like the Ogrons, the Thals, the Draconians, The Exxilons, the Movellans, the Varga’s, the Aridians, the Delegates of the other galaxies, the Spirodons etc.

Furthermore the revival also doesn’t play to each monsters unique strengths either. Both the Daleks and the Cybermen are usually just depicted in the exact same way, as a massive army sweeping across the land. There’s no attempt to try and play to the Cybermen’s strengths by having them attack the heroes in tight claustrophobic settings, or show a planet under the Daleks rule. The Daleks and the Cybermen will both often just fly through the air, zapping everything in sight and then all get blown up, or swept away at once.

Even the Master gets this treatment too somewhat. His manipulative nature, though played up in The Sound of Drums to some extent, is eventually abandoned so that he too eventually just unleashes a massive army of monsters. Similarly The End of Time and Death in Heaven also both simply see the Master unleash an army like the Daleks and the Cybermen.

Then there is the fact that many of all 3 villains stories take place on modern earth, specifically modern day London too.

In the classic era a grand total of just two Dalek stories took place on modern earth in 26 years. Resurrection and Day (and even then that was only partly in both stories, Evil also takes place albeit very briefly in its first episode.)

In the revival however 6 Dalek episodes have taken place entirely in modern day earth (whilst 4 more, The Parting of The Ways, The Magicians Apprentice, The Day and Time of the Doctor have taken place partly on modern day earth.)

All but four meanwhile (Asylum of the Daleks, Into the Dalek, Bad Wolf and The Witch’s Familiar) have taken place on earth in general. In the classic era, only 5 Dalek stories in total took place largely or entirely on earth (Two 60s era Dalek stories Invasion and Evil, one 70s era Dalek story, Day and two 80s stories took place on earth. Even then Evil of the Daleks only takes place partly on earth. Parts of The Daleks Masterplan and The Chase take place on earth, but as a whole both stories take place largely on alien planets.)

With the Cybermen meanwhile ironically only three stories in 26 years took place on modern earth (and even then Attack only partially takes place on earth,) and only one took place in London.  With New Who meanwhile only Nightmare in Silver and their recent season 10 and 12 appearances don’t take place on earth.

All 3 villains have more or less merged together as bland, generic doomsday villains who now have largely the same motivations, the same method of attacking, scaring the viewer (arriving in huge armies), their stories have largely the same locations, they are also often thrown together too. (Every Cyberman story since 2014 has featured the Master, and prior to that 4 Cybermen episodes feature Daleks.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

See what I mean?

This wouldn’t even be as bad if these three villains not only didn’t keep showing up every single year, but they kept being the main villains of every single season too. Do you know that the Classic series once went 5 years without using the Daleks from Troughton to Pertwee? (It also had two more gaps of 4 years each without the pepper pots.) The Cybermen meanwhile were absent for 5 years in Pertwee’s time and later 7 years from Tom Baker to Peter Davison? In fact including these gaps and the 3 years they missed with Hartnell, there are twice as many seasons without Cybermen than with them in the Classic era (can you say the same thing about the revival?)

The Classic era also didn’t feature the Master for the first 7 years either, yet New Who it seems is completely dependent on these classic villains?

Obviously I am not saying don’t use the classic villains at all. The Daleks, Cybermen and the Master when used properly are fantastic villains, but it can’t come across as anything but lazy when all 3 are trotted out almost every single year as the main antagonists.

Rather than focusing on changing the Doctors sex or species, a better way to bring about change to Doctor Who would be in creating new and iconic villains. Other than the Weeping Angels, so far no new series villain has become as iconic as any of the classic series major villains. (The Silence could have, but their arc more or less petered out.)

None have even had the strength to carry a series. It’s not because the new series villains are poor. On the contrary I think a lot of New series villains like say The Beast could easily carry a full series and become just as iconic as classic era villains like say the Sontarans. Ultimately however I think that the writers of the new series either don’t care enough to develop their new antagonists, or are perhaps too scared to try something new ironically when they should in this instance.

Companions

Now for the record I have enjoyed many of the companions in the revival. The likes of Billie Piper, Freema Agyeman, Karen Gillan and John Barrowman were all excellent in their roles, and have all gone on to have fantastic careers on both sides of the Atlantic.

That said however when you look at the companions story arcs, their backgrounds and even just their relationship with the Doctor, you can see that the revival once again falls into a formula.

All of the companions barring a very few, Jack, River and Nardole are from 21st century earth.

The majority of them are attracted to or in love with the Doctor. (Rose, Martha, River, Jack, Amy, Clara.)

Several of the female companions have a wimpy, boyfriend, who becomes the secondary companion of the Doctor, and is jealous of the Doctor, but who eventually proves himself a hero in the end. (Rory, Mickey and Danny.)

Several of the female companions have a more sympathetic father figure and a more aggressive mother figure who hates the Doctor as she sees him as a bad influence. Nevertheless at the end of the series, the Doctor and the mother will reach an understanding. (Rose, Martha, Donna.)

The companions story arc will usually be the following. The Doctor notices there is something odd about her. (The words Bad Wolf keep appearing, he keeps meeting her, there is something on her back, there are cracks in her bedroom, there are multiple versions of her etc.)

In all instances this will be because in the finale the companion will get super powers, be revealed to be the most important person in all of creation and save the entire universe from one of the Doctors archenemies.

Finally the companion will often have to be ripped from the Doctor too. She can’t just leave on her own accord (apart from Martha.) There will have to be some over the top, sci fi explanation for why she can never see him again. (Different universe, can’t travel backwards in time, can’t see her again without her burning up etc.)

However in all cases the writer doesn’t have the guts to actually kill the companion, so she still has to live a happy, wonderful life, it’s just that the Doctor can’t see her anymore. Rose still lives in a mansion with her David Tennant clone, Amy and Rory live a wonderful life together in New York, Donna gets happily married and gets a winning lotto ticket, Clara gains super powers and her own TARDIS.

Not all of the companions follow every single aspect of this template, (though some do like Clara.) All of them however will follow at least a few of these tropes to the point where the companion is now more of a stock character than ever before.

It is true that a few companions in the classic era were dull, uninspired characters who weren’t really developed well such as Dodo.

Still at the very least the classic era for the most part always tried to make the companions backgrounds and relationship with the Doctor different. Take a look at the 4th Doctors era alone.

You have Sarah Jane a journalist from modern day earth who has a strong friendship with the hero, Leela, a savage warrior woman from another world who tends to clash with the Doctor, Romana a Time Lady who is an equal to the Doctor in intelligence and Adric a young boy from another universe who the Doctor develops a strict mentor/student relationship with, Teegan who is a reluctant companion, and finally Nyssa who looks up to the Doctor, but has a much warmer relationship with him than Adric.

Even the 2nd Doctors era gives us a wide variety of companions in terms of backgrounds and relationships with the Doctor. We have Ben and Polly who are merely friends with the Doctor, and who come from modern day England. Then we have Jamie who is from the past, and who becomes more of a willing accomplice to the Doctor, as he has a similar desire for adventure and recklessness. Victoria meanwhile is more vulnerable and younger and has more of a father/daughter relationship with the Doctor, whilst Zoe on the other hand is from the future and talks to the Doctor as an equal due to her scientific background.

The original series ironically despite what the media tells us, often made more of an effort to at least make its companions different, where as the revival is still essentially just reusing the Rose Tyler template after 15 years.

Story arcs

Doctor Who - Complete Bad Wolf Speech - YouTube

Aside from the companions story arcs more or less being exactly the same, the shows other major story arcs are all very similar and repetitive too.

Series 1, 2, 3 and 4 all feature a monster or villain from the Time War whose main aim is to take over the earth and rebuild his fallen race and empire there. The Dalek Emperor, the Cult of Skaro, The Saxon Master, Davros and the Daleks. The Specials even reuse this idea with Rassilon and the Time Lords.

Also all season finales of the Davies era, apart from Journey’s End feature the villain trying to turn humans into monsters (the Emperors Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master race, whilst the shock twist in Last of the Time Lords is that the Toclafane are humans, much like how the shock twist in The Parting of The Ways is that the Daleks were humans too.)

The Matt Smith era meanwhile relies heavily on the Doctor learning he is about to die. The specials see the Doctor learn about a prophecy that he will die “Your song is ending.” In season 5 the Doctor discovers that his TARDIS will blow up at a specific date in the future. In season 6 sees the Doctor learn that an astronaut is going to shoot him at some a specific date in the future at lake Silencio. Finally season 7 sees the Doctor learn that he will die in a future battle on Trenzalore.

Season 9 and seasons 12 both tease us that the Doctors origins are not what we thought, and reveal the identity of something that is only referred to by a mysterious title. “The Hybrid,” “The Timeless Children.” Both finales then feature the Doctor back on Gallifrey, where the Time Lords are portrayed as monstrous and we discover this mysterious something is the Doctor, and our perception of him has been changed forever.

The Master and the Cybermen have also been featured as the villains, working together in 3 out of the last 5 finales, whilst 5 finales in total feature aliens invading the earth. The Stolen Earth and the season 11 finale meanwhile both feature aliens stealing planets.

Finally in what is perhaps the laziest bit of writing in the entire franchise, series 12 saw the Doctor reduced to the last of his kind again. The first 7 years of the revival saw the Doctor cope with the Time Lords having been wiped out, whilst the 50th saw all of the Doctors team up to save the planet. Killing the Time Lords off again 7 years later not only almost seems comical after everything the Doctor went through to save them, but also smacks of “we honestly don’t know where to take this character, so lets revisit the same story arc from 2005 because it worked back then.”

On top of this the revival also tends to reuse certain episode types as well. To date there have been 9 episodes of the revival set in Victorian London. On top of that there have also been a number of episodes that see the Doctor meet a historical figure who helps the Time Lord battle an alien threat, only for the Doctor to then show them that they will be remembered, or at least lecture the audience about it.

The Unquiet Dead, The Shakespeare Code, The Unicorn and the Wasp, Vincent and the Doctor, Rosa and even the recent Tesla episode all follow the same basic plot. This isn’t always a bad thing mind you as Vincent and the Doctor I feel is one of the strongest episodes of either series, but still when you have so many other aspects of the revival that are similar it does start to look as though the Fitzroy crowd aren’t really trying to think up new stories and ideas.

Conclusion

It’s not always a bad thing if a writer reuses certain ideas. Both Terry Nation and Robert Holmes reused certain themes and concepts. Also it’s not as though Doctor Who hasn’t become formulaic for certain periods in the past, such as the Troughton era that relied too heavily on base under siege stories, or the Pertwee era that became too caught up in invasion earth, spy and espionage stories.

The difference is however that these periods never lasted as long, because new blood would always come in and shake things up. New Who meanwhile has featured the same basic ideas, from last of the time lords, to Daleks, Cybermen, The Master always being the main villains, to companions being the chosen one, from modern day earth, fancying the Doctor for close to 15 years now.

The reason for that is because they are all following the same cult like mantra of “Doctor Who is all about change” but are all focusing on changing the wrong things. They are focusing on changing time honored traditions and pieces of Doctor Who lore to keep it fresh, whilst peddling out the same tired ideas that they still think are current and trendy.

The result is a show that is making no one happy.  Fans are furious that the lore is being disrespected with The Timeless Children, whilst casual viewers have not surprisingly adopted an attitude of “seen one Doctor Who, seen them all.” Which for a show about a man who can travel literally anywhere is quite sad.

In the next edition of this series we will be looking at the negative effect the shows toxic fandom have had on the series.